Writing CLEAN CODE - CLEAN PATCHES - that are easily readable and maintainable is also an essential part. So, this week is spent mostly on fixing up the commits, commit messages, making preparatory/clean-up patches and debugging for more changes.

Progress

Following last week, I continued with fixing up the commits that implements the fixup -C and fixup -c commands. After that, I started with updating the test script and replacing the amend command on which we worked earlier, with the fixup -C command. But I got stuck at parsing the multiple word command i.e fixup -C in lib-rebase.sh. I discussed with Phillip and Christian and got a pointer to make additional case for merge and fixup options in lib-rebase.sh. Then I debugged the code again and did some changes as two tests were failing with fixup -c and also added a new test case for fixup -c command.

Next, as guided by Christian I also split some commits and added those changes in the preparatory patches. After that added additional commits and tests for the working of amend! commit upon --autosquash, following Phillip’s patches.

Then after doing all the changes in the code base, tests and documentation one of the important steps before sending the patches to the mailing list, is to write the cover letter explaining the reason and use of patches, wrote that and did the changes as guided by Christian and Phillip.

Git commands for preparing patches:

• git format-patch, for preparing patches for email submission and include –cover-letter for adding the cover letter.
• git send-email, for sending a collection of patches as email instead of pull requests and setting up gmail as the smtp server.
• git am, for applying a series of patches from mailbox and its good practise to test and apply patches locally before sending it to the mailing list.

Patch series sent :

Finally the patch series with RFC sent to the mailing list. And the work branch can be found here.

Todo

For the coming week, next task includes:

• Debug and look into the code base of commit.c, to find a way out for implementing amend! commit and discuss on the mailing list regarding the UI.
• Look around the current implementation of Phillip’s patches of amend! commit, which implements it as git commit --amend=<commit>.
• Work on the reviews and suggestions on the patch series, sent on the mailing list.

Thanks.