I'm a regular user of Subversion, exploring workflows offered by Git. I feel myself rather comfortable with Git's way of managing things but in Subversion, I often use one certain pattern which I'll explain in a moment, and it seems to be impossible to do in Git. I hope you'll explain how to work around this issue of change my mindset to fit Git's idea.
Suppose I have a line of development. At some point I fork a new branch off the tip of that line; let's call that point "B" (for "base"). In this new branch I implement lots of new stuff, and during the course of the development, a certain file springs into existence and gets developed over time; let's call it "file.c". Let's say the tip of this branch is "X" and it contains the described file "file.c". Now I decide I want to start implementing another approach to the problem being solved in "X", so I branch another line of development off the commit "B", let's call it "Y". The problem is that the file "file.c" found in "X" contains some code which is somewhat orthogonal to "X" itself and I would like to use it in my fresh banch "Y". So I want that file to appear in "Y". Of course, and this is a key point, I want it to retain the whole history of its development in the branch of its origin, "X". In Subversion, I'd just `svn copy` it from the URL corresponding to the branch "X" either to the working directory with checked out tip of "Y" or to "Y" directly. All the history of that file would be preserved. In Git, I can do $ git checkout -b Y B $ git checkout X file.c $ git add file.c $ git commit The problem is that after this, `git log file.c` shows only one commit which brought the file into the tree. `git log -C --find-copies- harder` doesn't add anything. So the history is lost. As git-add can't add a file from an existing commit and you can't selectively merge just one file from a branch (well, not without some interactive mode with manual weeding out unneeded changes) and you can't git-cherry-pick a series of patches related to just one file in one go, I see no way to get what I want. I tried to google this and anything I was able to find was [1] which references [2]. Both posts actually don't provide any solution. The latter mentions that one should not "copy the code", but I think my case is clearly diferent. Any insights are appreciated. 1. http://markpasc.livejournal.com/186489.html 2. http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0612/34518.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Git for human beings" group. To post to this group, send email to git-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to git-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/git-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
