Hi, I'm pleased to announce a new and very simple tool to help with managing large patch series with our Gerrit workflow.
In our workflow we often find it necessary to create a series of dependent changes in order to make a larger change in manageable chunks, or because we have a series of related changes. Because these are part of larger efforts, it often seems like they are even more likely to have to go through many revisions before they are finally merged. Each step along the way reviewers look at the patches in Gerrit and leave comments. As a reviewer, I rely heavily on looking at the difference between patchsets to see how the series evolves over time. Occasionally we also find it necessary to re-order the patch series, or to include or exclude a particular patch from the series. Of course the interactive git rebase command makes this easy -- but in order to use it, you need to supply a base upon which to "rebase". A simple choice would be to rebase the series on master, however, that creates difficulties for reviewers if master has moved on since the series was begun. It is very difficult to see any actual intended changes between different patch sets when they have different bases which include unrelated changes. The best thing to do to make it easy for reviewers (and yourself as you try to follow your own changes) is to keep the same "base" for the entire patch series even as you "rebase" it. If you know how long your patch series is, you can simply run "git rebase -i HEAD~N" where N is the patch series depth. But if you're like me and have trouble with numbers other than 0 and 1, then you'll like this new command. The git-restack command is very simple -- it looks for the most recent commit that is both in your current branch history and in the branch it was based on. It uses that as the base for an interactive rebase command. This means that any time you are editing a patch series, you can simply run: git restack and you will be placed in an interactive rebase session with all of the commits in that patch series staged. Git-restack is somewhat branch-aware as well -- it will read a .gitreview file to find the remote branch to compare against. If your stack was based on a different branch, simply run: git restack <branchname> and it will use that branch for comparison instead. Git-restack is on pypi so you can install it with: pip install git-restack The source code is based heavily on git-review and is in Gerrit under openstack-infra/git-restack. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/git-restack/1.0.0 https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/git-restack I hope you find this useful, Jim __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
