Welcome to the 46th edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.
This edition covers what happened during the month of November 2018.
[RFC] Introduce two new commands, switch-branch and restore-paths
Duy Nguyen sent an RFC patch to the mailing list that implemented 2 new Git commands:
git switch-branch which “is all about switching branches”git restore-paths “for checking out paths”The goal is to split git checkout into different commands while
not deprecating it, so that “Old timers will still use
git checkout. But new people should be introduced to the new two
instead.”
The idea to do that appeared following a previous patch to print something when checking out paths,
though it has been considered for a long time that git checkout
should not do as many different things as it currently does.
Thomas Gummerer replied that he liked the idea and had been considering working on it. He suggested taking at look at maybe changing the behavior of the new command a bit.
Junio Hamano, the Git maintainer, then started to discuss the naming
of git restore-paths with Duy.
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason replied to Duy’s original message asking
questions about arguments accepted by git switch-branch and
suggesting a comparison between the new commands and git checkout
or even other source code management tools. He also discussed with
Duy about eventually deprecating git checkout.
Stefan Beller replied to Ævar and started discussing the names and
syntax of the command. Junio replied to Stefan telling that he
thought the names Duy suggested make sense, though checkout
already makes sense and longhands starting with checkout, like
checkout-branch, would make sense too.
Duy then sent a version 2
of his initial patch that “breaks down the giant patch in v1 and
starts adding some changes in these new commands”. Especially the
names were changed to checkout-branch and checkout-files.
A first discussion thread started with Junio, Duy, Stefan Beller and Stefan Xenos about the name and syntax of the new commands. As no clear conclusion appeared though, Duy decided to go back towards the original names he had proposed.
Another discussion thread among the same developers was about using “unnamed branch” instead of “detached HEAD”.
These discussions were followed by a version 3
where the names of the commands were changed back to switch-branch
and restore-files instead of restore-paths.
There were further discussions involving Elijah Newren, Junio, Duy, Ævar, Dan Fabulich, Thomas and Eric Sunshine, about a lot of related subjects, though Duy decided to wait until the release of Git 2.20 before sending an updated patch series.
Various
Light reading
Git tools and sites
sr.ht (https://sr.ht) is a very capable software forge which is already serving the needs of many projects in the free & open source software community site. It is 100% open source software and includes goodies such as a wiki, mailing lists, ticketing, with neat features such as all the pages work without Javascript, and it is designed to support an email Git workflow. Provided hosting is available for a low cost and contributing to the software can get one credit towards hosting. It was announced in a sr.ht, the hacker’s forge, now open for public alpha blog post.
Adobe’s git-server, a nodegit-based application to serve Git repositories via http:// and https://.
Git Butler: Pull Request and Issue Workflow Automation – an alternative to GitHub Actions (covered in Git Rev News #44), allowing to automate Git workflow by creating powerful rules with a simple visual editor
This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Gabriel Alcaras <gabriel.alcaras@telecom-paristech.fr> with help from Johannes Schindelin, Kaartic Sivaraam and Matt Singletary.