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The Art of Manually Editing Hunks

kennyballou.com

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Re: The Art of Manually Editing Hunks

#5

Post by recursive »

impure wrote: post #2

Yeah, you can do this to make your commits cleaner, but I find it easier to just manually edit the file and then undo after you add the patch.

I've never felt the urge to commit half of a file, but if I did, surely I would just copy the whole file to scratch buffer somewhere, edit the real file to the first state I want, and then commit that.

Some people say they have to re-learn regular expressions each time they use them. I think this is mostly because they don't use them much. For me, I have to re-learn fancy git stuff like hunk staging each time I use it. Because I never use it.

Re: The Art of Manually Editing Hunks

#7

Post by mananaysiempre »

rapidlua wrote: post #4

Is it just me, or the piece doesn’t explain how to make edits without messing up the hunk?

If you were actually editing a patch file, that would be a concern; but in Git, you only edit one hunk at a time, so all’s fine as long as you don‘t mess up the context lines—Git will ignore the source and destination line numbers and counts that your editing has likely rendered incorrect. (An easy way to mess up the context lines is to have your editor strip trailing whitespace on save, as the unified diff syntax for an empty context line is a single space. If anybody asks, in no way did this cause me to be puzzled for literal weeks by hunk edits failing seemingly at random.)

Re: The Art of Manually Editing Hunks

#8

Post by mananaysiempre »

recursive wrote: post #5
impure wrote: post #2

Yeah, you can do this to make your commits cleaner, but I find it easier to just manually edit the file and then undo after you add the patch.

I've never felt the urge to commit half of a file, but if I did, surely I would just copy the whole file to scratch buffer somewhere, edit the real file to the first state I want, and then commit that. Some people say they have to re-learn regular expressions each time they use them. I think this is mostly because they don't use them much. For me, I have to re-learn fancy git stuff like hunk staging each time I use i…

I don’t know, I feel that having to go through each change individually before committing is useful discipline. Nothing to learn: just tell yourself to only ever use `git add -p` and the rest will come naturally. Your first edited hunk, in particular, will come the first time you want to stage your actual change without having to delete that debug print that you figure might still come in handy. (Also useful but admittedly situational are git checkout -p, git reset -p, and git stash -p; and editing hunks within those is a bit of a rarity.)

I guess the difference might be that my workflow is less edit → stage → commit and more edit → (stage things I’m sure about → edit/debug things I’m not →)* commit. For example, “the staged version is what I have in the debugger, modulo debugging code” can be a useful invariant to maintain. (Now that I’m thinking about it, having the build system automatically save a snapshot of the source it used somewhere in the VCS—and stamp it in the executable—sounds tremendously useful. Surely somebody’s already built that?..)

Re: The Art of Manually Editing Hunks

#9

Post by PittleyDunkin »

recursive wrote: post #5
impure wrote: post #2

Yeah, you can do this to make your commits cleaner, but I find it easier to just manually edit the file and then undo after you add the patch.

I've never felt the urge to commit half of a file, but if I did, surely I would just copy the whole file to scratch buffer somewhere, edit the real file to the first state I want, and then commit that. Some people say they have to re-learn regular expressions each time they use them. I think this is mostly because they don't use them much. For me, I have to re-learn fancy git stuff like hunk staging each time I use i…

I use hunk editing quite a bit to organize long chains of commits into more logical order. This often involves merging and then re-splitting commits, but sometimes interactive rebasing is sufficient.
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