git-tools | Repository containing scripts to help with my day to day

I'm attempting to create a node/go library (https://github.com/simpleviewinc/git-tools) to help using git to checkout a repo to a specific remote/branch for handling production checkouts as well as developer checkouts for peer review. In both cases when a developer executes the checkout command I want it to execute and setup the working copy to the exact state declared in the remote repositories. So this means it will toss any untracked changes, unpushed commits, all of that. It is to make their local working copy or the server working copy exactly match the remotes. In production this is obviously so that the live server matches the exact state. On local, it ensures that the developer has the exact state of the fork that they are reviewing (with no changes on their local box interfering with the review). On local, it will prompt the user before doing destructive actions (like git reset, git clean).

The problem I am facing is that I cannot figure out a set of git commands that will consistently work in all cases when switching between branches if the branch has submodules. In my test, I have one repo with 3 branches, one branch has no submodules (master), another module has 1 submodule (submodule-test), and another branch has another submodule (submodule-test2) that points to a different repository (at the same path). I want my library to be able to switch the working copy from any branch to any other branch, executing the exact same set of commands, without the developer executing needing to know the specific setup related to the destination branch. Basically, it should be "give me this code whatever it is declared in the remote". In example if a dev is peer reviewing and both the main repo and the submodule have forks/branches. I want the dev to be able to just gun git-tools checkout proj1 --remote=dev1 --branch=pr-150 and it will checkout dev1's fork of proj1 and branch pr-150. Then if they ran git-tools checkout proj1 it would switch it back to master of proj1.

Right now the closest set of commands for switching branches I've been able to almost get working is:

I notice that one can specify ancestors of actual commit by using the ^ or the ~ character. For example, if I have the following log of commits

I have a question regrading intertwined repositories.

I have a repo, lets call it common_repo.

common_repo holds code which is relevant to most of my other repos, and I wish to pull it whenever I pull other repositories.

We've considered submodules, but as far as I understand this will create numerous copies of the common repo on my machine. This is undesireable as I may have differnet versions on my computer of the same files according to when I last pulled the dependent repo, which could lead to confusion.

Another alternative would be using some custom scripts such as sggested here. However this is not cross paltform (we have multiple developers working on different OS's), requires deployment on each machine, and doesn't play well git GUI clients such as smartgit or source tree.

Is there a better solution which we haven't considered?

I have been toying with rebase a bit, trying to split and combine history as described here: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Replace

Here is my test repository with split history: https://github.com/defufna/split-history

Note that "initial commit" and "Added description" commits both point to the same tree. What I'm trying to do is merge these two histories (while maintaining merges). I used this:

I am new to git and have done following setup:

1. There is a repository on a server S.
2. I cloned it to my machine A and add some changes in a branch.
3. I just copied the repro from 2 to an usb-drive. Then walked over to machine B, which has no connection to S or A.
4. I then used this copied repro to make some changes to the branch (on machine B).
5. I read more about git -because there has to be some way to move my commits- and found git bundle.

Now I want move my commits from the B to A. Then from A to S but I think this will not be the problem.

I tried to follow this text and tried to call

Suppose I say A..B. From here

The most common range specification is the double-dot syntax. This basically asks Git to resolve a range of commits that are reachable from one commit but aren’t reachable from another.

Let us say, a graph like this:

I have a git repo located on my machine at /path/to/repo, which contains several submodules, /path/to/repo/submoduleA and /path/to/repo/foo/bar/submoduleB.

Due to a workflow that I cannot change, the git repo gets copied (as in scp -r) to a remote server, where I work on the code. I want to pull the changes back to the original machine. Cloning/pushing from the remote server isn't an option.

It is tedious to go to each submodule and do

git remote add :/server/path/to/repo/

Is there a faster way? Something magical like

git remote add --submodules :/server/path/to/repo

executed from the top-level repo that will recurse to each submodule and add the appropriate relative path onto the remote of each submodule? git remote --help doesn't show anything useful, and neither the Git Pro Book section on submodules.

My best guess is something like

git submodule foreach 'git remote add :/server/path/to/repo/...'

might work, if there there is a way to replace the ... with the loop-dependent relative path of each submodule in that foreach. I just don't know of such a mechanism built into git submodule foreach

When creating a git submodule using git bash, I am getting below error