Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Quite a bit has changed in Guilt over the past two months. There have been 5 releases, as well as one release candidate (v0.19-rc1). During these releases, 71 files were changed (2210 insertions, 293 deletions) in 98 commits. There has been a number of patches I got via email:

Brandon Philips: 4

Nur Hussein: 3

Theodore Ts'o: 2

Yasushi SHOJI: 7

Brandon Philips contributed a significant portion of the documentation - currently every command has a man page! Additionally, he is trying to get Guilt picked up by Debian. So if you happen to qualify as a sponsor, do the right thing ;)

Nur Hussein contributed an uninstall script as well as fixed the patchbomb script.

As far as I know, Ted Ts'o is using Guilt to maintain his ext4 tree.

Yasushi contributed created a few patches which add several bits of quilt functionality (e.g., guilt-files, and guilt-series -v).

I have also been contacted by Peter Williams, the maintainer of gquilt (a GUI wrapper for quilt and mq, with a very similar name to guilt), if I would like to have guilt added as a backend. I checked out gquilt, and it looks really nice. I also looked at what it would take to add the backend, and it doesn't look like that much effort, but I need to implement few bits of functionality first. If anyone wants to volunteer, let me or Peter know. :)

It is really interesting how sometimes a bit of luck makes things happen. For example, little over 6 months ago, I wrote a few shell scripts, which called gq, to make my life a little easier. I worked on the for about a week, and then I decided I should share with the community. So I tagged the sources as version 0.10, and announced it on the git mailing list. One of the comments I got was about the fact that there is another project (completely unrelated) that had the name gq for a long time. Oh well, it was time for me to rename it. After some procrastination and hacking, new year rolled around, and I decided to release 6th version (v0.15), but this time it wouldn't be gq anymore - instead I would call it Guilt. My post from January describes how it got the name. As with every version of gq, I announced Guilt v0.15. I could see that Guilt was getting way better, and so I felt even more motivated to hack on it. v0.16 came out. And then a very unexpected thing happened. I got two patches from a guy on the mailing list. Sweet! I applied them, and release v0.17. Shortly thereafter, during the Linux Storage and Filesystem (LSF) workshop in San Jose, I got a patch from Ted Ts'o (of the ext[234] fame). I couldn't believe it, but it was true. I decided to release v0.19 the next day. At LSF, I met Brandon Philips, and we talked about Guilt. Rather shortly after LSF, he send me an email saying that he'll try to get Guilt into Debian. :) Well, about a month ago, he succeeded.

As many of you may already know, I stick around a number of channels on OFTC's IRC network, and it is rather interesting to see people try Guilt, or people talk about Guilt; generally suggesting that someone use it - and people do!

Anyway, I hope I didn't bore everyone to death with my little tour of history behind Guilt.

Here's another update on my version control system escapades (a follow up to Do I have...).

As several people mentioned during the 0.10 release of gq, the name is already in use by a rather well established project. So, after some idleing and hacking, I decided that it was time to give the scripts a new name, and announce the new version on the git and linux-kernel mailing lists (the announcement). I can't take credit for the rather clever name, I asked a few people, and the best suggestion was by Dave - Git Quilt or Guilt for short.

One thing I did not expect was the fact that someone would contribute 2 patches very shortly after I announced it. Here's the list of changes that made between v0.16 and v0.17:

Horst H. von Brand (2):

      Fix up Makefiles

      Run regression on the current version


Josef 'Jeff' Sipek (24):

      A minimalistic makefile

      Contributing doc file

      Added guilt-add

      Added guilt-status

      Expanded the HOWTO

      Added usage strings to all commands

      All arguments to guilt-add are filenames

      More thorough argument checking & display usage string on failure

      Changed status file format to include the hash of the commit

      Fixed guilt-refresh doing an unnecessary and somewhat wrong pop&push

      Fixed up guilt-{delete,pop} not matching the patch name properly

      Fixed guilt-{delete,pop} regexps some more

      Force UTC as timezone for regression tests

      Fixed a bug in guilt-pop introduced by the status file format switch

      Error messages should go to stderr

      Merge branch 'usage'

      Merge branch 'status-file'

      Yet another TODO update

      Added guilt-rm

      Makefile update & cleanup

      pop: Display the name of the patch from the status file, not the series file

      new: Create dir structure for the patch if necessary

      Documentation/TODO: Mark guilt-rm as done

      Guilt v0.17

I haven't had much time to work on Guilt since then, but I got an rather encouriging email from someone, who tried to apply Andrew Morton's -mm patch series on top of the kernel tree, but failed. The problem is with the way git-apply works. If it applies a patch with an offset, it still returns non-zero status. This makes guilt think that at least one of the hunks in the patch did not apply at all. As far as I know, there is no way to get the necessary information out of git-apply without either modifying it (which I might as well), or parsing the output for signs of rejection and ignoring the return status completely. I don't like the latter, but changing git-apply would limit the number of compatible git versions. :-/

Needless to say, patches are welcomed :)