These are just notes for me to remember how I manage DWM patching using git rebase. If you find them useful that’s great. Basically we’re going to create 3 branches, master, openbsd and custom. Then we’ll branch from openbsd temporarily into a patch branch, do the patching there and merge everything back into the custom branch using git rebase so that we have a clear linear commit history.
Requirements
- git
- peace and quiet
Obtaining the source
mkdir github
cd github
git clone https://git.suckless.org/dwm
cd dwm
Branch and do the OpenBSD build change
git checkout -b openbsd
vi config.mk
# uncomment the OpenBSD line and save changes
git add config.mk
git commit -m openbsd
Create our custom branch
Now that we have the OpenBSD specific branch we can use that as a basis for customisation. We’ll create a custom branch from where we’ll do the building.
git checkout -b custom
echo "util.o" >> .gitignore
echo "dwm.o" >> .gitignore
echo "dwm" >> .gitignore
echo "drw.o" >> .gitignore
echo "config.h" >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m "added .gitignore"
# do any minor custom changes here like border pixel width or mod key
make clean && make && doas make install
git add config.def.h
git commit -m custom
Do the custom patching
Now that we have a custom branch, when we want to include a patch we’ll build it in here but we’ll first make a branch from openbsd and call it something like the patch name.
git checkout openbsd
git checkout -b noborder
git apply <path to patch file>
git add <whichever files got modified by the patch>
git commit -m noborder
git rebase custom
git checkout custom
git rebase noborder
git branch -D noborder
make clean && make && doas make install
In summary
So at this point we’ve used openbsd branch as the basis for our patching and then brought all those changes into our custom branch and built it.
- master # as cloned from suckless
- openbsd # OpenBSD specific changes and minor mods, based on master branch
- custom # our custom patched version, based on openbsd branch