Re: Questions about how to use git

[James Youngman]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Kai YU <address@hidden> wrote:
>     Hi, I'm currently investigating how to fight software regressions with
> git bisect. Particularly, I want to use git bisect to help locate the
> #Bug12181 (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?12181). However, when I use "git
> checkout FINDUTILS_4_2_18-1" to switch to the version 4.2.18, it fails to
> compile.

As Kamil noted, probably because you are not using the correct version
of gnulib.   I don't believe there is a record in git of which version
of gnulib would be needed (since as Kamil notes, import-gnulib.config
was not introduced until later).   However, that tag name conicides
with a release.   Hence, the already-imported version of gnulib in the
4.2.18 release tarball is the correct version to use for that
particular tag.

> Moreover, I noticed that FINDUTILS_4_2_18-1.tar.gz (from
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/findutils.git/snapshot/FINDUTILS_4_2_18-1.tar.gz)
> is different from findutils-4.2.18.tar.gz (from
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/findutils/findutils-4.2.18.tar.gz).

Correct, FINDUTILS_4_2_18-1.tar.gz from the git server is simply a
tarball containing the content of the tree as at that tag.   On the
other hand, findutils-4.2.18.tar.gz is the full source release
(including an imported copy of gnulib) as created by "make dist".

> My question is,
> how to get the code of findutils 4.2.18 (which can be successfully compiled)
> by git automatically?

You can import findutils-4.2.18.tar.gz into your own branch, along
with the other releases, and bisect on that branch.   Whether this is
useful to you as an approach I can't tell, since I don't really know
what you are trying to achieve.

James.