Stacked Git

2023-05-15: StGit v2.2.4 has been released.

StGit regained the ability to upgrade from stacks created by very old versions of StGit. This includes, for example, stacks created with StGit v0.19 which is (unfortunately) what is still shipped by Debian/Ubuntu and their derivatives.

Also included are fixes for regressions affecting branch creation and patch import.

2023-04-26: StGit v2.2.3 has been released.

StGit is repaired to work on Windows once more.

2023-04-01: StGit v2.2.2 has been released.

This release addresses a bug that broke rebasing to a ref containing a ‘@’ character.

2023-03-29: StGit v2.2.1 has been released.

This bugfix release addresses regressions with running StGit in linked worktrees and with hooks not working when running from a subdirectory of the work dir. Several other minor issues are also repaired.

See the changelog for all the details on this release.

2023-02-24: StGit v2.2.0 has been released.

This release contains several quality of life features, including new options for specifying patches and branches on the command line. And improved performance.

Patch Locator Syntax

In addition to being able to specify patches by name, StGit now supports several new alternatives for specifying patches:

• By relative offset from the topmost patch, e.g. -1, +3, or ~2.
• By their absolute index in the stack, e.g. 0 or 12.
• By offset from another patch, e.g. some-patch~ or some-patch+2.
• By relative offset from the last visible patch, e.g. ^ or ^2.

The new patch locator syntax is detailed in the stg man page.

New Options for stg series

To complement the new patch locator syntax, new -O/--offsets and -I/--indices options display each patch’s relative offset from top and absolute index, respectively.

The new -r/--reverse option allows the stack to be shown top-side up. This may produce a more intuitive view of the stack for some StGit users. Consider adding a stack alias using this option, for example with git config --global stgit.alias.stack 'series -rOP'.

Speaking of aliases, now each of the “Display Options” for stg series have a --no-xxx variant. These can be helpful for masking options used in series aliases. For example, the stack offset suggested above could be run as stg stack --no-offsets to disable display of offsets.

Finally, the --short option now takes an optional integer value to specify the number of patches to show.

Branch Locators

StGit now supports specifying a branch using the same @{-<n>} syntax supported by git. This enables, for example, switching to the previously checked-out branch with stg branch @{-1} or just stg branch - (where - is synonymous with @{-1}).

Command Line Options

The --signoff option now has a short variant -s. This is a breaking change. The --submodules no longer has a -s short option. Similarly, the --series options for stg import, stg float, and stg sync now use -S instead of -s for their short variants.

Gitoxide

StGit now uses Gitoxide (gix crate) instead of libgit2 (git2 crate) as its git access library. In addition to being a pure-Rust dependency, gitoxide has considerably less startup overhead (4x) than git2. This has a big impact on the latency of StGit commands.

See the changelog for more details on this release.

2023-01-16: Blog Post: How I Keep Using Stacked Git at $WORK

This blog post from lthms describes their single-branch workflow using StGit and is a follow-on to their first blog post about StGit.

2022-12-12: StGit v2.1.0 has been released.

This minor release introduces several long-awaited features, including some potentially breaking changes.

The main breaking feature is relaxed stack initialization. Instead of needing to explicitly initialize a StGit stack on a branch, patch creating commands such as stg new and stg import will automatically initialize the stack, if needed. Most other commands that previously required an initialized stack will now operate as if there is an empty stack if the stack is not yet initialized.

Another potentially breaking change is that the stgit.gpgsign configuration variable is now independent of commit.gpgsign. I.e. to have signed stack metadata commits, stgit.gpgsign must be set to true.

See the changelog for all the details on this release.

2022-11-30: StGit v2.0.4 has been released.

This release makes some repairs to aliases, including documenting aliases along with all other StGit configuration variables.

2022-11-21: StGit v2.0.3 has been released.

This release includes a few minor bug fixes and lots of spelling corrections.

2022-11-17: StGit v2.0.2 has been released.

This release further improves support for sparse checkout with partial clone and worktrees. A few documentation improvements are also included.

2022-11-07: StGit v2.0.1 has been released.

This bugfix release addresses pathological documentation build performance issues that should improve the downstream packaging experience.

See the changelog for all the details on this release.

2022-11-06: StGit v2.0.0 has been released.

This major release of StGit brings improved performance, several new features, and many refinements compared to StGit 1.x. It is recommended that all StGit users upgrade to 2.0.0.

Many thanks to all the StGit users who took the time and effort to try out the many alpha, beta, and release candidate releases leading up to this final 2.0.0 release. Lots of issues, big and small, were worked out from this effort to make this a high-confidence release.

The changelog has the details of the many changes, but some highlights include:

• Performance improvements across the board. This is largely due to StGit 2.0.0 being reimplemented in Rust, thus eliminating many overheads inherent to the Python interpreter, but also due to direct accessing the git repository’s object database using libgit2 instead of always using git subprocesses.
• Refined output and improved error messages. Commands generally produce more terse output. Stack modifying operations (push, pop, refresh, etc.) use color and sigils to display their outcomes.
• stg email format and stg email send replace stg mail. The new commands lean on the battle-hardened git format-patch and git send-email commands, making StGit’s email capabilities more robust and more standard.
• StGit aliases now behave like Git aliases.
• stg refresh gains the -r/--refresh option, which allows a new patch to be created and record changes with one command.

2022-09-02: StGit Extension for Visual Studio Code 0.9.0

How cool is this, Samuel Rydh has implemented a StGit extension for Visual Studio Code! In Samuel’s words:

The extension is closely modelled on the corresponding StGit mode for Emacs, which I have been using for years.

There is a bit of learning curve to use the extension since it is heavily reliant on operations bound to keyboard shortcuts. The main audience is really Emacs users that have started to use VSCode.

See the extension in the VSCode marketplace or checkout the repository on GitHub.