jlebar

I've been working on a set of git tools for Mozilla, and I'm pleased to announce them to the community at large. These tools let you easily:

• push from git to a public tree (m-i, m-c, etc.),
• push from git to try, and
• export patches to bugzilla.

Have a look at the readme for usage instructions, and of course please file bugs (or send pull requests) if you encounter any problems.

Notes

• I haven't tested on Mac OS, so I don't expect things will work particularly well there. Bugs and pull requests are welcome.

• Pushing from git to hg uses hg qqueues, and will delete the contents of the git-temp qqueue. I recommend using a tree for pushing to hg that you don't use for anything else. Otherwise, if you push from git to m-i using hg tree X, then write a patch in tree X, then push again from git to m-i using X, your patch will be deleted!

  (The safe way to re-use hg tree X is to hg qqueue patches before writing your patch.)

• Most of the credit here is due to bholley, whose tools for pushing from git to bugzilla and for converting git to hg patches comprise the majority of the code.

Why bother?

Git is rather unpopular at Mozilla, so perhaps some justification is in order. Why bother using git at all?

I decided to try using git a few months ago, because B2G uses a git clone of mozilla-central, and using both git and hg was painful. I based my workflow on bholley's.

Although I didn't enjoy learning git, I've come to enjoy using it for hacking on Firefox. I particularly like the fact that git branches, unlike mq patches, are attached to a base revision.

With hg, I'd often end up in a situation where I hack on patch A, qpop it, work on some other stuff, update my tree, then try to push patch A again. At this point, I'd often get conflicts, which I'd have to resolve by hand. (Otherwise, I could try to find an old revision atop which the patch applied cleanly, then hg rebase my way to victory.)

This problem simply does not exist with git—I rebase my branches only when I intend to.

Also, git rebase --whitespace=fix is kind of awesome.

The learning curve is a definite downside—git's UI is awful—but now that I'm up to speed, I have no intention of switching back to hg.