[webkit-dev] [webkit-changes] [52439] trunk/WebCore

[Evan Martin]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 12:20 PM, David Kilzer <ddkilzer at webkit.org> wrote:
> Setting "[diff] renames = copies" in ~/.gitconfig or in your .git/config file for each project will make git diff try to do rename detection when creating a patch.  (You may also use "--find-copies-harder" or "--find-copies-harder -C" switches on the command line.)  This will provide hints in the git diff about file renames, but it still only uses a heuristic, and svn-apply currently doesn't know about these hints:

This sort of thing has been a persistent problem for Chrome as well.

Since our code review tool and our trybot also rely on SVN-specific
features (including stuff like revprops, as well as the way it handles
new files and renames), we are already doing work in multiple places
to extend these tools to either understand git-style diffs or produce
SVN-style diffs from Git.

See for example GetMungedDiff in:
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/tools/depot_tools/git-try?revision=34087&view=markup

One option I've been considering is extending git-svn to include a
"git svn diff" that produces an SVN-style patch.  That would "fix"
this problem at the source, at the cost of needing to retrain everyone
to use it when submitting WebKit patches.  :\