umpf is a tool that helps you manage git branches and combine them into a software release. It can create tags and export the changes as a patch stack. umpf was originally designed for the Linux kernel but it can be used for other projects as well.
There are several reasons why commits are split into multiple branches:
- Some but not all features may be shared among multiple projects. Separate branches make it possible to avoid unnecessary changes to a specific release.
- A set of commits are developed for upstream. Keeping the commits on a separate branch makes further development and upstreaming easier.
- A branch may be created from a patch series collected from a mailing list. Keeping it separate makes it easier to update to a new version.
So working with multiple branches makes patch handling and further development easier. But combining those branches to a release can be tedious and error prone.
This is where umpf comes in. It automates the process of creating releases. It creates tags in a reproducible way. And it can create patch series from those tags.
umpf is a bash script, so no installation is necessary. It just needs a few command line tools such as sed, grep and of course git.
To enable bash completion, make sure umpf is in your $PATH, then:
$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions $ ln -s /path/to/umpf/bash_completion ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/umpf
umpf -h gives a basic description of the command line arguments.
More details about umpf can be found in the documentation.