Re: Some general comments about git repository and commit policy

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 10/13/2017 05:20 PM, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Friday, 13 October, 2017 16:44:59 Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
>  > Ethan mentioned offline old CVS branches, that brings to mind something
>  > about git worth mentioning for those maintainers not familiar with git.
>  > git uses terminology "branch" quite often, but after working with git
>  > for a while one will realize the "branch" analogy fails a bit after
>  > merges are done. More accurately, git pushes the heads along. It's
>  > important noting this because once two branch heads are merged, the
>  > names once associated with those branches are lost and one doesn't know
>  > what branch was what at the time they were under development.
> 
> So post-conversion, what is the git terminology that distinguishes
> the stable 5.2 branch from the main 5.3 branch?
> If I want to apply a patch specifically to the 5.2 "branch"
> (clone something / modify it / merge back)
> what are the git commands I use to do that so that it doesn't
> affect the main development "branch"?
> 
> Ethan

You may create branches anywhere in the repository.  The first step 
would be to checkout the 5.2 branch with

git checkout branch-5-2-stable

with the requirement that there be no modified files or staged modified 
files.  (Plain "git checkout FILENAME" will discard file changes and 
return the file to the repository.)

Now once in branch-5-2-stable, do a branch

git checkout -b b52_patch

and any modifications and changesets one makes at that point end up on 
"branch"/"head" b52_patch.  I've done the above in the test repository, 
and inquiring the branch info tells me:

sebald@ ~/gnuplot/test_repository/gnuplot $ git branch
* b52_patch
   branch-5-2-stable
   master

I think what the above is telling us is b52_patch is the current active 
branch, branch-5-2-stable was the prior branch, and prior to that was 
master.  If one does a "merge" from within b52_patch, I believe git 
assumes the prior branch "branch-5-2-stable" is to be the merge point. 
However, one can merge anywhere, I think, just by specifying an object 
(tag, head name, probably SHA number or however many first X unique 
numbers).

Dan