Question

I’m using git, but I’ll be glad to hear answers relevant to other SCMs.

I’m having a few small changes which are relevant just for me (using a different build scheme, relevant only for my configuration), and I really need to have them.

The right thing to do is of course, merge it into the trunk, but until I’ll merge it into the trunk I have to keep a list of changes which will not be committed.

So let’s say I’m need to change my makefile to have CC=mygcc (since I need the gcc symlink pointing to a bad version for other software I’m compiling), but I don’t want to commit it (others don’t, so others don’t want to have mygcc symlink).

What do I do to allow me easily synchronize and update the main repository?

Answer 1

In Mercurial, this is best done with an mq patch.

To make the initial patch:

cd <working copy>
hg qinit
...make changes to your working copy
hg qnew <patch_name>

Then, when it is time to pull changes from the remote or actually commit new local changes:

hg qpop -a        # remove all patches from your working copy
hg pull --update  # get new changesets from the remote and update to the latest
...work on local files
hg commit -m "commit changes without touching the patch"
hg push           # send changes to a remote repo that don't include the patch
hg qpush -a       # apply all patches to your updated working copy