History of git-deps

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.