Rebasing a patch series
-----------------------
-TODO:: rebase, ...
+While you are busy writing, submitting, and revising your patch
+series, other people will be doing the same thing. As a result, even
+though you started writing your patches on top of what was the latest
+history at the time, your stack base will grow ever more out of date.
+
+When you clone a repository,
+
+ $ stg clone http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cmarinas/stgit.git stgit
+
+you initially get one local branch, +master+. You also get a number of
+'remote' branches, one for each branch in the repository you cloned.
+In the case of the StGit repository, these are
++remotes/origin/stable+, +remotes/origin/master+, and
++remotes/origin/proposed+. +remotes+ means that it's not a local
+branch, just a snapshot of a branch in another repository; and
++origin+ is the default name for the first remote repository (you can
+set up more; see the man page for +git remote+).
+
+Right after cloning, +master+ and +remotes/origin/master+ point at the
+same commit. When you start writing patches, +master+ will advance,
+and always point at the current topmost patch, but
++remotes/origin/master+ will stay the same because it represents the
+master branch in the repository you cloned from -- your 'upstream'
+repository.
+
+Unless you are the only one working on the project, however, the
+upstream repository will not stay the same forever. New commits will
+be added to its branches; to update your clone, run
+
+ $ git remote update
+
+This will update all your remote branches, but won't touch your local
+branches. To get the latest changes into your local +master+ branch,
+use stglink:rebase[]:
+
+ $ stg rebase remotes/origin/master
+
+This command will do three things:
+
+ 1. Pop all patches, so that your local branch (+master+, in this
+ example) points at the stack base. This is the same commit that
+ +remotes/origin/master+ pointed at at the time you started
+ writing your patches.
+
+ 2. Set the stack base to the given commit (the current, updated
+ value of +remotes/origin/master+).
+
+ 3. Push the patches that were popped in the first step.
+
+The end result is that your patches are now applied on top of the
+latest version of +remotes/origin/master+.
+
+The primary reason for rebasing is to reduce the amount of conflicts
+between your work and others'. If one of your patches changes the same
+part of the same file as a patch someone else has written, you will
+get a conflict when you run stglink:rebase[] the next time after the
+other person's patch has been accepted upstream. It is almost always
+less work to rebase often and resolve these one at a time, rather than
+a whole lot at once. After all, you have to rebase eventually; if you
+mail out patches that are based on an outdated branch, everyone who
+tries to apply them has to resolve the conflicts instead. There are
+more effective ways to get popular.
+
+
+When your patches are accepted
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+If and when some or all of your patches are accepted upstream, you
+update and rebase just like usual -- but be sure to use the
++$$--merged$$+ flag to stglink:rebase[]:
+
+ $ git remote update
+ $ stg rebase --merged remotes/origin/master
+
+This flag makes the rebase operation better at detecting that your
+patches have been merged, at some cost in performance.
+
+The patches that had been merged will still be present in your patch
+stack after the rebase, but they will be empty, since the change they
+added is now already present in the stack base. Run stglink:clean[] to
+get rid of such empty patches if you don't want them hanging around:
+
+ $ stg clean
Importing patches
~mdw / stgit / commitdiff