Comments on: Git Feature Branches

By: James Bunton

James Bunton — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:04:01 +0000

Something new in Mercurial (AFAIK) is ‘local branches’.
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/LocalbranchExtension
As far as I can tell these are pretty much like Git’s branches. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be a part of the standard Mercurial distribution yet.

By: Björn Steinbrink

Björn Steinbrink — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:09:47 +0000

Probably nowhere. I’m just curious when it comes to URL parameters and usually throw “interesting” things in there to see what happens (or usually: how to make the script behave badly ;-)). Passing refs was the natural thing to try when I saw the hashes in the URLs.

Obviously, for blobdiff and commitdiff, that’s not what you’re actually supposed to do. blobdiff doesn’t handle multi-file diffs at all, and commit diff has the commit message header, which is pretty bogus when you’re not diffing against the real parent(s).

I guess you could add a treediff pretty easily, as it seems to boil down to a commitdiff without the commit message header.

By: Eric Kow

Eric Kow — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:51:37 +0000

Hi, I think you can contact James
[url="http://jblack.linuxguru.net/contact_me"]here[/url].

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:23:16 +0000

Hi Eric,

I didn’t know about that Planet — nice site, and I’ve added it to my Bloglines feeds.

But I can’t find any contact information to ask to be added. Do you know whom I talk to?

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:20:42 +0000

Git in particular.

With Mercurial, I would have had to have a separate repo for every single feature branch. It would be possible, but would be more difficult and take more careful scripting, disk space, and thought.

Mercurial’s in-tree branches aren’t really the same thing as Git’s, and I don’t think they’d be quite right for this.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:17:30 +0000

I don’t think this is quite what I’m after. It could merge a bunch of stuff into master, but what I want is to merge the same stuff into each topic branch, then merge all those into master.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:06:38 +0000

Thanks, Bjorn. I’m wondering where I might have gone to learn about this? I didn’t see it in any docs.

By: Aaron Kaplan

Aaron Kaplan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:21:20 +0000

Are you raving about feature branches in general, or git feature branches in particular? Does git support this model better than mercurial, for example? If so, how?

(Um, raving as in “rave reviews,” not as in “raving lunatic.”)

By: Eric Kow

Eric Kow — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:35:08 +0000

John, might I suggest you get your blog added to the [url=http://planet.revisioncontrol.net] Revision Control planet[/url]? I think it’s run by James Blackwell, a Bzr guy.

They might have to create a new category for users like you and zooko who take on the task of learning about various version control systems and telling us about it. (for which, thanks!)

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:15:18 +0000

You can configure Git to merge multiple branches when you “git pull”, doing an octopus merge. See the git-config manpage for documentation about branch..merge.

By: Björn Steinbrink

Björn Steinbrink — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:23:28 +0000

Oops. Just verified that the displayed changes were correct, but missed that the filenames are bogus/missing in the output.

If you can live with a somewhat bogus header, this works:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=commitdiff;h=next;hp=master

But yeah, gitweb seems to be actually missing a way to display “correct” diffs between arbitrary trees.

By: Björn Steinbrink

Björn Steinbrink — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:53:17 +0000

gitweb has that ;-) You can throw almost(?) anything into the h/hp parameters. So for example if you wanted a static URL that shows the diff from master to next for git.git, you’d use:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blobdiff;h=next;hp=master