stg - manage stacks of patches using the GIT content tracker
StGIT (Stacked GIT) is an application providing similar functionality to Quilt (i.e. pushing/popping patches to/from a stack), on top of GIT. These operations are performed using GIT commands and the patches are stored as GIT commit objects, allowing easy merging of the StGIT patches into other repositories using standard GIT functionality.
An StGIT stack is a GIT branch with additional information to help making changes to individual patches you already committed, rather than making changes by adding new commits. It is thus a non-forwarding, or rewinding branch: the old head of the branch is often not reachable as one of the new head's ancestors.
Typical uses of StGIT include:
Tracking changes from a remote branch, while maintaining local modifications against that branch, possibly with the intent of sending some patches upstream. StGIT assists in preparing and cleaning up patches until they are acceptable upstream, as well as maintaining local patches not meant to be sent upstream.
In such a setup, typically all commits on your branch are StGIT patches; the stack base is the branch point where your changes "fork" off their parent branch.
Preparing and testing your commits before publishing them, separating your features from unrelated bugfixes collected while developping.
In such a setup, not all commits on your branch need to be StGIT patches; there may be regular GIT commits below your stack base.
Many StGIT commands take references to StGIT patches as arguments. Patches in the stack are identified with short names, each of which must be unique in the stack.
Patches in the current stack are just referred to by their name. Some commands allow you to specify a patch in another stack of the repository; this is done by suffixing the patch name with an @ sign followed by the branch name (eg. thispatch@otherbranch).
A number of positions in the stack related to the patch are also accessible through // suffixes. For example, patch//top is equivalent to patch, and patch//bottom refers to the commit below patch (i.e. the patch below, or the stack base if this is the bottom-most patch). Similarly //top.old and //bottom.old refer to the previous version of the patch (before the last stg push(1) or stg refresh(1) operation). When referring to the current patch, its name can be omitted (eg. currentpatch//bottom.old can be abbreviated as bottom.old).
If you need to pass a given StGIT reference to a git command, stg id(1) will convert it to a git commit id.
The following generic option flags are available. Additional options are available per-command, and documented in the command-specific documentation.
Prints the StGIT suite version that the stg program came from, as well as version of other components used, such as GIT and Python.
Prints the synopsis and a list of all commands. If a git command is given this option will display the specific help for that command.
We divide StGIT commands in thematic groups, according to the primary type of object they create or change.
User-support commands not touching the repository.
Starting with 0.12, StGIT uses the same configuration mechanism as GIT. See git(7) for more details.
A number of StGIT commands make use of template files to provide useful default texts to be edited by the user. These <name>.tmpl template files are searched in the following directories:
$GITDIR/ $HOME/.stgit/templates/ /usr/share/stgit/templates/