Using git to submit a patch to Eclipse

I've been getting more and more comfortable with git of late, so when it came time for me to poke around at an Eclipse bug (#130854), I decided to work off the git mirrors rather than CVS. I must say, although the Eclipse CVS tools making working with CVS relatively tolerable, using git is a huge improvement for external contributors like myself. Since I was working on org.eclipse.jface, I started with:

git clone git://dev.eclipse.org/org.eclipse.jface/org.eclipse.jface.git
git clone git://dev.eclipse.org/org.eclipse.jface/org.eclipse.jface.snippets.git

After importing those projects into my workspace, I noticed some compilation errors due to recent changes in SWT. Now, the bug I was working on was an old bug, so I didn't have to chase the latest development, so I just switched to the R3_5_maintenance branch instead.

git checkout -b b130854 origin/R3_5_maintenance

Now the project compiled just fine, so I could start poking around at the issue at hand. All told, this was probably just 3-5 minutes, as opposed to drilling through a CVS tree in Eclipse for 3-5 minutes, followed by fetching a coffee while waiting for the branch to check out (another 3-5 minutes), then another 3-5 after realizing I really wanted a different branch. At this point, it was back to a normal git workflow. I mucked around with the code, had about 3 separate commits, all broken, before I realized where I wanted to actually make the change. Just reset HEAD on my branch to ignore those commits, committed the change that actually fixed my bug, then formatted a patch file to send to bugzilla.

git add ...
git commit ...
git reset ...
# repeat until satisfied
git format-patch origin/R3_5_maintenance

All in all, a very quick and painless experience, though this would be relatively easy even using CVS. The real benefit of git would come into play if I had a longer-lived local branch (trying to add a new feature). I'd have full version control available locally to maintain my work as a patchset against the latest upstream work. A hearty thanks to everyone at Eclipse that's been pushing forward on making git repositories available. Even if projects don't migrate to using git as their canonical repo, just having a git mirror available makes working from the outside significantly easier than it has been in the past.