NAME

       commit-patch - commit patches to Darcs, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Monotone, 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, Monotone, 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

       •   David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org>

       •   Jim Radford <radford@blackbean.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright 2003-2013 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.