more advanced (?) cvs/git patch maintenance

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

Among my workflows I have one for maintaining distribution packages which contain patchfiles against some known release, much like Debian packages. I'm not a git (or other CVS) expert, but the advantage of using such a system to generate patchfiles after making whatever changes one needs to make, without ever worrying about making a backup of the original file.
KDevelop has been helpful with its patch review plugin that allows to inspect the changes for a single file, a given directory or a whole project (it is just missing the option to diff a selection of files). Many of my patchfiles were created with (or assembled from) the patch overview from KDevelop's patch review plugin.

So typically I keep my changes uncommitted, directly in the branch of interest. That works fine with KDE's ReviewBoard, too.

It doesn't work so nicely with Qt's gerrit, which has made me read up on topic branches and more advanced uses of git diff.

It seems that KDevelop contains an algorithm to deduce the parent branch of topic branches (branch with the most recent commit), right? Does it also have the possibility to do something like `git diff $topicbranch $parent` (or the current branch vs. its parent), to generate a patch file that shows the differences between the tips of the 2 branches without having to find the best common ancestor in the history window?

Thanks,
René