Rogan Dawes on Nostr: Ever received a tarball dump of a git repo with changes, and wanted to graft it back ...

Ever received a tarball dump of a git repo with changes, and wanted to graft it back into the history at the most likely branching off point? e.g. a vendor source tarball. This is what I ended up doing:
1. Clone the repo into ./repo (or adjust as desired).
2. export GIT_DIR=repo/.git
3. extract the tarball to ./tarball (or adjust as desired)
4. cd tarball
5. git log --reverse --format="%H %ai" --after=2016/03/01 --before 2016/06/30 | while read HASH DATE; do echo -n "$HASH $DATE "; git diff --name-only --diff-filter=M $HASH | wc -l; done | tee /tmp/diff_files # adjust date ranges as needed. This can take a LONG time!
6. sort -k5n /tmp/diff_files | head
to get the commits with the smallest number of changed files.
7. cd ../repo
8. git checkout $hash
9. cd ../tarball
10. git add .
11. git status # to check if there are any other untracked files that need to be updated in the index
12. git commit -m "Add vendor tarball"
13. git tag some_tag # so it doesn't get lost

done