xref: /freebsd/tools/tools/git/HOWTO (revision c1d255d3)
1# $FreeBSD$
2
3This directory contains tools intended to help committers use git when
4interacting with standard FreeBSD project resources like Differential.
5
6I. arcgit
7
8arcgit is a wrapper script around the arc command line tool that simplifies the
9automatic creation of a series of Differential reviews from a series of git
10commits.  The intended workflow is:
11
121. Create a series of commits in git.  Each commit will be a separate review, so
13   try to make each commit as self-contained as possible.  The series of commits
14   should demonstrate a logical progression towards your end goal.  For example,
15   one commit might refactor existing code to expose a new API without changing
16   any current functionality.  A subsequent commit could then introduce your new
17   code that uses the new API.
18
19   It usually will not be helpful to present your code in the order in which it
20   was actually written and can actually be harmful.  For example, if you
21   introduced a bug early in your development process that you fixed in a
22   subsequent commit, it is a waste of your reviewer's time to have them review
23   old code with known bugs.  Instead, it would probably be best to squash the
24   bug fix into the commit that introduced it, so that the bug is never
25   presented to your reviewers in any review.
26
27   The commit headline and commit message will be imported verbatim into
28   Differential, so try to give each commit a meaningful commit message that
29   gives your reviewers the necessary context to understand your change.
30
312. Create your reviews bu running this command in your git repo:
32     $ arcgit -r C1~..C2 -R reviewer -T testplan
33
34   C1 should be the first commit that you want reviewed, and C2 should be the
35   last commit that you want reviewed.  You may add multiple reviewers by
36   specifying the -R option multiple times.  You can CC (AKA subscribe) people
37   to a review with the -C option.  Note that if you subscribe a mailing list
38   to a review, the mailing list will be emailed for every comment or change
39   made to each review.  Please be judicious when subscibing mailing lists to
40   reviews.  It may be better to instead send a single email to the appropriate
41   list announcing all of the reviews and giving a short summary of the change
42   as a whole, along with a link to the individual reviews.
43
443. When you need to make a change and upload it to a review, use the following
45   process.  First, check out the branch corresponding to the review (arcgit
46   automatically creates this branch for every review that it creates):
47
48     $ git checkout review_D1234
49
50   Next, make your change and perform whatever testing is necessary.  Commit it
51   to your repository with this command:
52
53     $ git commit --fixup HEAD
54
55   You can upload the change to the code review by running this command in your
56   repository while (ensure that you are still on the review_D1234 branch):
57
58     $ arc diff --update D1234 review_D1234_base
59
60   When you run arc, it will pull up your editor and give you a chance to
61   change the message that will be shown in Differential for this upload.  It's
62   recommended that you change it from the default "fixup! ...." as that does
63   not give your reviewers an indication of what changes were made.  It's not
64   recommended that you give the code review fixes meaningful commit messages
65   directly because we will be using git's autosquash feature in the next step,
66   which depends on the fixup! tag being present.
67
68   Do not merge in other branches, or rebase your review branches at this point.
69   Any changes that are made will show up in your reviews, and that will create
70   extra noise that your reviewers will have to ignore.  If a reviewer requests
71   a change that requires your commit to be based off of a later version of
72   head, I would suggest deferring the change from the review and creating a
73   new review with the change once you hit step 5.
74
754. Once the reviews have been approved, you need to prepare your patch series
76   to be committed.  This involves squashing the fixes made in code review
77   back into the original commit that they applied to.  This gives you a clean
78   series of commits that are ready to be commited back to svn.
79
80   First, merge each of your review branches back into your main development
81   branch.  For example:
82
83     $ git checkout myfeature_dev
84     $ for branch in review_D1234 review_D1235 review_D1236; do \
85       git merge $branch || git mergetool -y || break; done
86
87  Next, do an interactive rebase to squash your code review fixes back into the
88  main commit:
89
90    $ git rebase -i -k review_D1234_base
91
92  review_D1234 should be the name of the *first* review that was created for
93  you in step 2.  For every commit, your editor will be pulled up and you will
94  be given one last chance to edit your commit message.  Make sure that you fill
95  in the "Reviewed by:" tag indicating who accepted the review.  This would
96  be a good point to add other tags like MFC after:, Sponsored by:, etc.
97
98  The rebase will not introduce any actual changes to your code if done
99  properly.  You can use this command to double-check that no changes were
100  inadvertently made here:
101
102    $ git diff myfeature_dev@{1}
103
1045. Finally, you should get up to date with the latest changes from head:
105
106    $ git pull --rebase origin master
107
108  It is not recommended that you combine this step with the rebase done in the
109  previous step.  The reason for this is that if you perform an interactive
110  rebase that changes the commit that you branch from, it becomes much more
111  difficult to use the reflog to confirm that the interactive rebase did not
112  introduce unwanted changes.
113
114  At this point, you are ready to commit your changes to head.  The importgit
115  script can be used to import your commits directly into git.
116