This tool was born from experiences at
SUSEcon 2013, when I attempted to help a
colleague backport a bugfix in OpenStack
Nova from the master
branch to a stable release branch. At first sight it looked like it
would only require a trivial git cherry-pick, but that immediately
revealed conflicts due to related code having changed in master
since the release was made. I manually found the underlying commit
which the bugfix required by using git blame, and tried another
cherry-pick. The same thing happened again. Very soon I found
myself in a quagmire of dependencies between commits, with no idea
whether the end was in sight.
In coffee breaks during the ensuing openSUSE conference at the same venue, I feverishly hacked together a prototype and it seemed to work. Then normal life intervened, and no progress was made for another year.
Thanks to SUSE's generous Hack Week
policy, I had the luxury of being able to spending some of early
January 2015 working to bring this tool to the next level. I
submitted a
Hack Week project page
and
announced my intentions on the git mailing list.
Again in May 2018 I took advantage of another Hack Week to package
git-deps properly as a Python module in order to improve the
installation process. This was in preparation for demonstrating the
software at a Meetup
event of the Git
London User Group.