Hacker News Reader

Git bisect is awesome. Before I discovered it, I was manually bisecting the codebase, and stubbing out the missing half.

View on HN

Not to take away from git bisect (or hg bisect, which is no more broken than the rest of mercurial) -- I don't think it is an alternative to the thing you used to do.

git bisect is "temporal bisection", i.e. you delete half of a time interval. The manual bisect is kinda-sorta "spatial" in the sense that you delete half a region of code. the two things work by similar principles, and their problem domains overlap -- but they are not the same.

They're complimentary techniques. One might git bisect down to the commit level, then manually bisect the sub-changes in the commit if it's a large one.

I've done the manual equivalent in perforce as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com