Over the last few months, my daughter Sydney and I have been working on Python programming assignments. I showed her that we can occasionally make a snapshot of our work using git, so if we mess something up, we can always get back to our previous checkpoint.

So we got into the habit of starting off new assignments with “git init .“.

Recently, though, I decided I wanted to host a copy of her assignments on my home file server, so we could check out the assignments on her computer or on mine. In the process, I decided to merge all of the separate assignments into a single git project. As a matter of principle, I wanted to preserve the change histories (diffs and author and dates — but not necessarily the old SHA hashes, which would have been impossible).

I did some searching on the topic, and I found a variety of solutions. One of them used a perl script that sent me off into the weeds of getting CPAN to work. A couple of good posts (here and here) used branches for each assignment, and then merged all of the branches together. The results were OK, but I had the problem where the assignment files started off on their own top-level directory, and then I later moved the files to their own assignment subdirectories. I really wanted to rewrite history so it looked like the files were in their own subdirectories all along.

Then I noticed that my daughter and I had misspelled her name in her original “git config –global”. Oops! This ended up being a blessing in disguise.

This last little snag got me thinking along a different track, though. Instead of using branches and merges to get my projects together, maybe I could use patches. That way, I could edit her name in the commits, and I could also make sure that files were created inside the per-assignment directories!

So I whipped up a little shell script that would take a list of existing projects, iterate through the list, generate a patch file for each one, alter the patch file to use a subdirectory, (fix the mis-spelled name), and then import all of the patches. The options we pass to git format-patch and git am will preserve the author and timestamp for each commit.

#!/bin/bash

remoteProjects="$*"

git init .

for remoteProject in $remoteProjects ; do
   echo "remote project = $remoteProject"
   subProject=$(basename $remoteProject)
   ( cd $remoteProject ; git format-patch --root master --src-prefix=AAAA --dst-prefix=BBBB --stdout ) > $subProject.patch
   # essential file path fixes
   sed -i -e "s|AAAA|a/$subProject/|g" $subProject.patch
   sed -i -e "s|BBBB|b/$subProject/|g" $subProject.patch
   sed -i -e "s|/$subProject/dev/null|/dev/null|g" $subProject.patch
   # other fixes, while we're here
   sed -i -e 's/syndey/sydney/g' $subProject.patch
   # bring the patch into our repo
   git am --committer-date-is-author-date < $subProject.patch
   # clean up
   rm $subProject.patch
done

exit 0

I think this solution works nicely.

The one with the separate branches above was kind of cool because a git tree would show the work we did on each assignment. But in the end, the linear history that we produced by using patches was just as appropriate for our project, since we actually worked on a single homework assignment each week.

I suppose I could combine the two solutions by creating a branch before doing the "git am" (git "accept mail patch") step. That is left as an exercise for the reader.