[m-rev.] Upgrading Boehm GC, the git way.

[Peter Wang]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2014 21:16:44 +1100, Paul Bone <paul at bone.id.au> wrote:
> 
> Offhand I don't know of an automated way, but we could manually squish these
> together.  This may make git merges more difficult though as it removes a
> common root (in history if not in file contents) when doing a 3-way merge.
> If it does make merging more difficult then we loose the main benifit of
> importing this stuff into our git repository - at which point we might as
> well include a tarball and some .patch files.

There is git merge --squash but, yes, let's not do that.

I found a couple of ways to reduce the noise when viewing the history:

  - git log --first-parent
    But commits merged from the stable branch to the master branch will
    also be suppressed, so it's not ideal.

  - git log -- . ':!boehm_gc'
    It's a bit of a mouthful but might be okay with an alias/script.

I'm fairly comfortable with submodules but it requires additional steps
that other developers might not like.  It also makes the main repository
incomplete of itself which is a bit undesirable.

Another option would be do the merging work in a separate repository,
as we would for a submodule, but then just copy the files into the main
repository.

Peter