So I have a simple git-find working, and now I want to use it to rip out some patches I am interested in. The repository I am working on has a lot of uninteresting deltas in it that I don’t care about. I am actually only interesting in backporting an interface change in one file from the klipsng branch:

    $ git-find klipsng --file linux/net/ipsec/ipsec_sa.c
    ...

This works as advertised, I get a list of revisions that altered that file. The current git command line parsing does not allow me to do much with this however.

So I am giving myself some time to write a git-find script that I can use to feed commits to another tool, like git-graft (or git-cherry-pick).

I don’t really know what I am doing yet, so I want to survey what is available in git-* tools and reuse as much of the available features.

I want to be able to take a bunch of patches that were applied to one semi-related branch and appened them to the current branch, or better yet a new branch of the current. The bunch of patches will be selected by what they change; I should be able to graft all patches that modify some file, or modify some regular expression.

Here is what I mean:

 ,-----X---X---X---X--- ... ---             "historical" branch
o
 `--------------------Y                     "current" branch
                       \
                        `---Z---Z---...     "working" branch

You start off at current branch and run something like:

git-find historical --file some_file.c --or --re 'some pattern' \
| git-graft --new-branch working -

This will let me take the interesting subset of X commits and apply them at some point Y. Should the patches X cause conflicts with the current branch, then git-graft needs to let the user resolve those conflicts a patch at a time. The default is to apply onto the current branch, however if desired it should be possible to create the changes on a new, working, branch. The result is a new set of Z commits, as shown above.