1 Since guilt is heavily based on Mercurial queues (mq), some of the following
2 is shamelessly stolen from the mq page [1].
7 Andrew Morton originally developed a set of scripts for maintaining kernel
8 patches outside of any SCM tool. Others extended these into a suite called
9 quilt [2]. The basic idea behind quilt is to maintain patches instead of
10 maintaining source files. Patches can be added, removed or reordered, and
11 they can be refreshed as you fix bugs or update to a new base revision.
12 quilt is very powerful, but it is not integrated with the underlying SCM
13 tools. This makes it difficult to visualize your changes.
15 Guilt allows one to use quilt functionality on top of a Git repository.
16 Changes are maintained as patches which are committed into Git. Commits can
17 be removed or reordered, and the underlying patch can be refreshed based on
18 changes made in the working directory. The patch directory can also be
19 placed under revision control, so you can have a separate history of changes
26 In Guilt, all the patches are stored in .git/patches/$branch/, where $branch
27 is the name of the branch being worked on. This means that one can have a
28 independent series of patches for each branch present in the repository.
29 Each of these per-branch directories contains 2 special files:
31 series: This file contains a list of all the patch filenames relative to the
32 per-branch patch directory. Empty and commented out lines are ignored.
34 status: This file contains the state of the stack. What patches are applied.
42 # initialize the patch directory
45 # create a new patch called 'patch1'
51 # refresh patch1 with the changes we just made
54 # If we look at .git/patches/$branch/patch1, we see a diff with the changes
57 # create a new patch called 'patch2'
66 # list all applied patches
69 # list all applied and unapplied patches
72 # pop the top most applied patch
75 # push the next patch on top of the currently applied patches
85 [1] http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MqExtension
86 [2] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt