how to fork and record patches to foreign projects

[Attila Lendvai]

aka the mess in clasp-developers.

a few thoughts that may be useful:

when we fork a repo into clasp-developers, i advice to create a branch
in it called 'clasp', or some specific name of a new feature, i.e.
*not* the master branch.

git checkout -b new-branch

if new patches are needed from upstream master, then *rebase* the
extra patches to the newly pulled master. don't merge the branches,
because that quickly renders git-commit based comparison useless.

first make sure you don't have pending changes. if you have, then you
can use this to save/restore them:

git stash
git stash pop

then:

git checkout master
git pull master
git checkout my-branch-to-be-rebased
git rebase --verbose master

if some problem happens, you can either:

git rebase --abort

or fix the conflict by hand in the working copy, and then:

git diff
git add whatever-changed.lisp
git status      # to see that everything has been staged
git rebase --continue

if you want to drop some patches while rebasing, then do:

git rebase -i master

and then just delete the relevant lines in the editor that pops up,
then save, and quit to continue.

this is especially useful when a parallel branch/fork is expected to
be open for a longer time.

the current cffi and its master branch is a good example of what
shouldn't be done.

---

IMO, avoiding merge commits in general is a good idea, unless it's
really a significant merge that you want to keep recorded in the
history, or if you want to GPG sign the merge commit.

you can also attempt a fast-forward pull, e.g. when dev was pulled
into master:

git pull --ff-only . some-other-branch

this may fail without changing anything in the repo if it's not
possible to pull without a merge.

when you accept a PR, then on github you can chose the rebase
option on the merge button. then the commits just get copied over into
the master branch, as if they have been committed there to begin with.

---

random note: the new version of git-fetch-revision.sh in the
build-refactor branch supports cloning branches other than master, and
even specific tags.

hth,

-- 
• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
--
“Chaos should be seen as a teacher that teaches us, through the
negative, what not to do.”
	— Mark Passio, http://youtu.be/atjdCbayxYM?t=46m33s