Hi,
On Fri, 29 Dec 2006, Daniel Tonda Castillo wrote:
> From what I gather, so far if no write acces is provided, the most
> important git commands would seem to be clone and patch, but patch is
> still not clear for me yet.
The most important git command (at least to me) is git-diff. Say, your
local branch is named "myweb" and is derived from "web/master" (you can
start such a branch by "git checkout -b myweb web/master"). Now you want
to see all changes between the original web/master and your myweb:
$ git diff web/master..myweb
Note that it automatically pages the output. But these are many changes,
and now you are only interested in your changes to the file README:
$ git diff web/master..myweb README
And then, you did a few changes and want to verify that all you did since
the last commit looks sane:
$ git diff
This gives you the changes which will be committed by a "git commit -a".
Maybe you found a little typo in the file AUTHORS. Fix it and verify with
$ git diff AUTHORS
that all is fine.
So, why did I mention format-patch in another mail instead of diff?
Because you are most likely committing in small, logically separated
steps, and you do not want to submit one big unauditable diff, but rather
several easy-to-verify patches. So, format-patch creates nice files from
the commits you created.
BTW git has also something like "patch": it is called git-apply (I don't
really know why Linus did not call it "patch"). Something like
$ git apply < a-diff-from-somebody-else
will do almost the same as patch, but it recognizes the renaming and
copying enhancements from git's diff format.
Another quite useful command is git-show. Given a committish, you can look
at the diff and the commit message (it is automatically paged):
$ git show web/master~2
shows the parent of the parent of the current tip of web/master. In the
upcoming git release, 1.5.0 (due mid February), git show can also show
directories and files:
$ git show han-wen:README
shows you what the file README looks like in the branch han-wen.
That's it for today's git lesson, brought to you by a very happy LilyPond
user.
Ciao,
Dscho