COMMIT-PATCH(1)

NAME
commit-patch - commit patches to CVS, Darcs or Mercurial repositories

SYNOPSIS
commit-patch [-m message] patch-file

DESCRIPTION
Normally version control systems don't allow fine grained commits. commit-patch allows the user to control exactly what gets committed (or "recorded", in Darcs parlance) by letting the user supply a patch to be committed rather than using the files in the current working directory.

commit-patch currently supports the following version control systems: CVS, Darcs, and Mercurial.

OPTIONS
-m, --message=message - An optional message to use as the commit text. If the message is multiple lines then Mercurial and Darcs will use the first line as the patch name and the rest as commit details. If the "-m" option is not specified then the result will be the same as whatever the underlying version control system would do if you didn't specify a message name on the command line. That is, commit-patch does not interfere with the patch naming process of the underlying version control system; Darcs will still ask you interactively and CVS will still launch your editor.

DIAGNOSTICS
commit-patch works by manipulating the working directory using "patch", "interdiff", and the underlying version control system's "diff". If any part of the process fails, commit-patch will attempt to restore the working directory to the state it was before the command was run. Any errors from the underlying version control system or from patch will be printed.

CAVEATS
The patch specified on the command line must originate from the same place as the current directory. That is, the following will not work:

  cvs diff -u > ../a.patch
  cd ..
  commit-patch a.patch

You must run commit-patch from the same directory that the original patch was based from.

Darcs and Mercurial put "a/" and "b/" in front of all the paths in the diff output. Don't worry about this; commit-patch takes it into account.

EXAMPLES
Typical CVS usage:

  cvs diff -u > a.patch
  emacs a.patch
  commit-patch a.patch

Mercurial usage with a message specified:

  hg diff > a.patch
  emacs a.patch
  commit-patch -m "This is a commit message" a.patch

Darcs usage with a multi-line message specified:

  darcs diff -u > a.patch
  emacs a.patch
  commit-patch -m 'This is the patch name
  Here are the patch details' a.patch

AUTHORS

•   David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org>

•   Jim Radford <radford@blackbean.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 2003-2006 by David Caldwell and Jim Radford.

commit-patch is distributed under the GNU General Public License. See the COPYING file in the distribution for more details.

HISTORY
commit-patch was originally called "cvs-commit-patch" and was a bash script written in 2003 by Jim Radford (with David Caldwell in the room drawing the procedure on a white board). David later converted it do "darcs-commit-patch", then integrated them back together into commit-patch. Mercurial support was then added. At some point David translated from bash into perl because funky bash quoting issues were causing problems with a repository that had a space in one of the directory names.