COMMIT-PATCH(1) 						   User Commands						   COMMIT-PATCH(1)

NAME

       commit-patch - commit patches to Darcs, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Subversion, or CVS repositories

SYNOPSIS

       commit-patch [--amend] [-m message] [-F message-file] [-v] [--dry-run] [patch-file]

       commit-partial [--amend] [-v] [--dry-run] [--retry] [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. If patch-file is not supplied on the command line then the patch will be read from standard input.

       commit-partial is like commit-patch except that it will create a patch from the current changes in the current working directory and launch
       your editor so that you can edit the patch and the commit message (using the VISUAL environment variable, or if that isn't set the EDITOR
       environment variable, or, if that isn't set, vi. Any files you specify will be passed to your version control's diff command.

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

OPTIONS

       -a, --amend - Amend a previous commit. Currently only Darcs and Git support this option. When used with Git it will amend the previous
       commit. When used with Darcs, Darcs will ask you which patch you want to amend.

       -m, --message=message - An optional message to use as the commit text. If the message is multiple lines then Darcs, Git, and Mercurial 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; CVS and
       Subversion will still launch your editor.

       -F, --message-file=filename - You can optionally get the commit message from a file. This is generally only useful for scripting commit-
       patch.

       -v, --verbose - Turn on debugging. This will print the commands that commit-patch is running to get the patch committed.

       -n, --dry-run - Turn on more paranoid debugging. This will print the commands that commit-patch will run to get the patch committed but it
       won't actually run those commands.

       -r, --retry - Only available in commit-partial. This will reload the last patch that was attempted to be committed into your editor instead
       of the current changes in the directory. This is for cases where the patch fails to commit for some reason and you want to try to fix it
       instead of starting over.

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, Git 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

       o   David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org>

       o   Jim Radford <radford@blackbean.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright 2003-2010 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.

perl v5.10.1							    2011-02-23							   COMMIT-PATCH(1)