Re: "groups of files" in Git?

[Igor Djordjevic <igor.d.djordjevic@gmail.com>]

Hi astian,

On 12/07/2017 00:27, astian wrote:
> Nikolay Shustov wrote:
>> With Perforce, I can have multiple changelists opened, that group the
>> changed files as needed.
>>
>> With Git I cannot seem to finding the possibility to figure out how to
>> achieve the same result. And the problem is that putting change sets
>> on different Git branches (or workdirs, or whatever Git offers that
>> makes the changes to be NOT in the same source tree) is not a viable
>> option from me as I would have to re-build code as I re-integrate the
>> changes between the branches (or whatever changes separation Git
>> feature is used).
>> Build takes time and resources and considering that I have to do it on
>> multiple platforms (I do cross-platform development) it really
>> denominates the option of not having multiple changes in the same code
>> tree.
>>
>> Am I ignorant about some Git feature/way of using Git that would help?
>> Is it worth considering adding to Git a feature like "group of files"
>> that would offer some virtutal grouping of the locally changed files
>> in the checked-out branch?
> 
> I never used Perforce and I'm not even sure I understand your problem,
> but I thought I'd mention something that nobody else seems to have yet
> (unless I missed it):
> 
> First, one thing that seems obvious to me from your description is that
> these "parallel features" you work on are obviously interdependent,
> therefore I would rather consider the whole thing as a single feature.
> Therefore, it makes sense to me to work in a single "topic branch".
> 
> This doesn't preclude one from separating the changes in logically
> sensible pieces.  Indeed this is par for the course in Git and people do
> it all the time by dividing the bulk of changes into a carefully chosen
> series of commits.
> 
> I think the most common way of doing this is to simply work on the whole
> thing and once you're happy with it you use "git rebase --interative" in
> order to "prettify" your history.
> 
> But, and here comes the part I think nobody mentioned yet, if your
> feature work is considerably large or spans a considerably long time it
> may be undesirable to postpone all that work until the very end (perhaps
> by then you already forgot important information, or perhaps too many
> changes have accumulated so reviewing them all becomes significantly
> less efficient).  In that case, one solution is to use a "patch
> management system" which will let you do that work incrementally (going
> back and forth as needed).
> 
> If you know mercurial, this is "hg mq".  I don't think Git has any such
> system built-in, but I know there are at least these external tools that
> integrate with Git:
> https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,_and_tools#Patch-management_Interface_layers
> 
> Feel free to ignore this if I totally misunderstood your use case.
> 
> Cheers
This message actually creeped me out the first time I read it, after 
writing an e-mail reply of my own[1].

The tone it`s written in, the points you make, and even the 
conclusion about "hg mg" -- as if you were reading my mind.

Yours was sent a bit before mine, but I guess we were writing it at 
the same time as well... Just spooky, lol.

That said, I totally understand what you`re talking about, and I gave 
an example of the desired (yet missing?) Git work flow here[2] :)

[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/6e4096fd-cbab-68f0-7a23-654382cb810e@gmail.com/
[2] https://public-inbox.org/git/27a3c650-5843-d446-1f59-64fabe5434a3@gmail.com/

Regards,
Buga