High-Level Problems with Git and How to Fix Them
gregoryszorc.com
gregoryszorc.com
In a decade of using Mercurial, I've managed to get a repository in such a confused state that I had to blow it up and start from scratch just once. In the same time, I've had to do the same for git repositories at least 5 or 6 times--and I never really used git all that much. Even nowadays, where I'm more or less forcing myself to use git [1], I'm incredibly hesitant to try any sort of complex git operation because of the risk that I might lose my in-progress commits.
While the problems of git's UI is well-known, I don't think it's as appreciated that git's complexity generally discourages people from trying things out. I'm never really sure what could cause me to lose unpushed commits or uncommitted working files, especially with git's predilection for reusing the same verb to do slightly different operations for different concepts. In stark contrast, it's more difficult to get Mercurial to chew up your work without telling you [2], and it's easier to explore the command lists to see if there's something that can do what you want it to do.
[1] The repositories I'm working on involve submodules, which hg-git is exceptionally poor at supporting well. Even so, the list of git alias commands on the whiteboard is entitled "Forcing myself to use git before I rage-quit and switch to Mercurial."
[2] I have done it, though. Worst offender was discovering that hg qrefresh <list of files> causes only those file changes to be committed, and files not mentioned are decommited to working-directory-only changes... which hg qpop happily deleted without warning me, causing me to lose a large patch. That was when I put the patch queue directory in version control.
Effectively nothing. By default, old, unreferenced data is only garbage collected after a month. If you screw up a rebase, the old commits are still there with the same hash they always had. You just need to point the branch at them again.
> ...or uncommitted working files
That's fair. If I'm unsure, I just stash or commit first. Anything that's in git can be retrieved.
Git makes using branches very easy and it is fairly quick with most operations. Once you understand what the commands are doing, you'll see that unless you do something specifically (like reset --hard with uncommitted changes, checkout a modified file etc.), you'll never lose work which has been committed in some branch or the other.
I tend to just do "in-between" commits very often and rebase to reorganise the commits (reorder, squash, reword) when I hit a (micro)milestone.
If your work has been committed and the repo was not just garbage collected, it is going to be easy to retrieve it from reflog even if you did something nasty with the branch and it appears that your commit has disappeared.
Git is the piece of software which I find very good in terms of what it does but it does it behind the worst user-interface I have ever encountered.
EDIT: minor clarifications and punctuation
`git clone https://repository.url` (download repository)
`git checkout -b issue_XXX` (create new branch with the name 'issue_XXX')
`vim README.MD` (edit a file)
`git add README.MD` (mark the file to be committed, `git reset README.MD` to unmark)
`git status` (see list of changed/marked files)
`git commit -m "Add Readme"` (create commit based on marked files)
`vim README.MD`
`git add README.MD`
`git commit -m "Fix Typo"`
`git checkout master` (switch to branch with name 'master')
`git merge --squash issue_XXX` (merge branch with name 'issue_XXX' into current branch (master), but stop before committing)
`git commit -m "Add Readme.MD"` (create a new commit)
`git push` (upload changes)
psa: `git reflog show stash` shows the stash list along w/ with their shorthashes for easy reference
Disclaimer, if you're compelled for none other than neurotic reasons to run `git gc` periodically like me, these old commits will get thrown out. I found this out the hard way :(
> I'm incredibly hesitant to try any sort of complex git operation because of the risk that I might lose my in-progress commits.
correct way of learning git is every time you want to use a "complex"/dangerous commands in git, you `cd /tmp` and create a git repository there. then create some commits, branches and experiment. you will NOT lose anything, but you will learn a lot.
I did and do this every time I have doubts. and with time you will understand how non-dangerous git commands are.
"dangerous" part comes from the user, not the software, and it is okay. when you accidentally kick a corner of a furniture, that does not make that furniture "dangerous".
A well designed ui should be learnable while being used - creating a fresh learning repo for dedicated learning for fear of losing data while using the tool in your "real" repo is the ultimate red flag in terms of usability.
PS. throwing out things you test on. isn't that how every programming tutorial works? write code NOT in your main repository, test things out, throw it away (or keep it, whatever)?
UI usability is irrelevant... ?!??
> isn't that how every programming tutorial works
Firstly, learning programming and learning to use a tool that is a component of your workflow are two independent things. The latter should generally (ideally) have a much lower (aiming towards zero) learning curve. Yes, this is possible, with good UI design.
Secondly, even programming language designers strive towards lowering this learning curve. There is, imo, a necessary complexity, or "table stakes" for any reasonably useful language, but its still very evident to any language designer that this is a trade-off. Usability is desirable.
For a tool as popular and essential as Git, usability should be a much more central goal than it seems to have been in the past.
Other tools are no different. If it's an important tool, it pays to actually study it. Do not expect tools to do what you mean before you know well what you mean.
I do understand, in quite a bit of depth (which I'm sure is still far from complete), how Git works. I still prefer to use Mercurial because it doesn't require me to be continuously aware of the dangers of those internals on a day-to-day basis - it doesn't supply me with a loaded foot gun. Sadly, I use Git every day, and rarely Mercurial, because that's what the masses have chosen and I've found using in-between compat tools not to be worth the extra hassle for me.
What I like about git is that it gives a simple algebra of patches (diffs), and allows almost any sensible operation over them.
It would be great to build a different CLI on top of the same data structures (and maybe the same plumbing) that would expose a more consistent and usable interface, while allowing for [most of] the same capabilities, and preserving interoperability. I suppose git-hg tries to achieve something similar, too.
For me, much of the pain of git CLI was alleviated first by a set of aliases, and then by using magit from within emacs.
Strongly disagree with that one. A UI that lets you work in the most efficient way (e.g. vi) can also be well designed, even if it's incredibly difficult to learn.
> creating a fresh learning repo for dedicated learning for fear of losing data while using the tool in your "real" repo is the ultimate red flag in terms of usability.
Again, strongly disagree. Git is a powertool. You don't let loose a powertool if you don't understand how it works. Creating a fresh learning repo is merely acknowledging that you don't know the tool well enough yet. There's nothing wrong with that.
There's a big difference between being noob-friendly and being user-friendly. Personally, I hate noob-friendly tools, because they tend to just get in the way.
See, I don't think you do disagree. I said a UI should be learnable while being used - vi is. I said nothing about it that learning needing to happen quickly.
I use vim every day; it's not my primary editor, but I'm incredibly comfortable with it, which I wasn't for years after I started using it. But during those years of learning, I never got stuck with an unusable dev environment, I never lost data, I never had to Google how to proceed in order to get my work done. If I ran into a problem, I had the option of opening an alternative editor and continuing with my nice non-corrupted dev env, or I could choose to spend some time figuring out the vim way (and learn something).
vi/vim have no foot guns.
Perhaps this comparison is slightly unfair to git - vi is much simpler insofar as a modal interface is a simpler concept to grok than directed acyclic graphs. So they're not directly comparable, since vi's main barrier to learning is memorising commands and git's is conceptual. However - as has been mentioned elsehwere - hg makes a fine candidate in that regard.
OP's advice was essentially to first learn how to use a tool in a sandbox before screwing up mission-critical services. I really don't understand why you perceived the need to learn how to use a tool in a sandbox as problem that lies somewhere else other than the clueless newbie who's taking his first steps.
Letting toddlers learn how to ride a bike by installing training wheels doesn't mean that bicycles are flawed or poorly designed.
When the piece of furniture has a serrated corner that cuts deep into your toe, you'll probably reevaluate the appropriateness of your metaphor.
PS: i have a lot of furniture with rought edges. I've learned my lesson, and furniture is not a problem anymore.
What if your repo with full history is about 30gb?
git commit -a git checkout -b before-complex-operation ...
To get back to where you were, git checkout before-complex-operation
> I never really used git all that much
Does not sound like a fair comparison ;)
It kinda sounds like the system you know best, is the one you can handle better regardless of whether it's git or Mercurial.
To me it reads as a warning that Mercurial repos are prone to being screwed up even if the user has over a decade of experience avoiding Mercurial's traps while with Git only bold inexperienced users can screw up repos in a similar matter.
The irony here is that the model that git internals use aren't really complex at all; it's the poor porcelain and poor naming that makes it seem complicated.
For me, at least, the underlying model actually makes it easier to try things out. As long as my work is in commits and I have refs that point to those commits, I can be pretty sure that I'm not going to lose anything. I also take a fair amount of comfort in the fact that (unlike, say, SVN), any remote actions can be deferred until I know things are correct locally.
This sort of robustness in the data model makes it a bunch easier for me to forgive the (very real) usability issues in the command line UI. (And, after years of work, the command line is getting more familiar, aside from some of the more complex rebase operations.)
Personally, I'm not shy about recursively copying the entire repository on disk to run potentially destructive experiments in a duplicated environment.
Also, once you understand how to pull things out of the reflog, it's usually not hard to restore to a sane state.
Agreed.
> Also, once you understand how to pull things out of the reflog,
That, and I'll also dump a git log of the last couple dozen commits into an editor buffer so that I can hang onto the commit ids. Until a GC cycle occurs, you don't lose the commits even if they aren't reachable through normal paths.
I want a VCS that does NOT try to hide how it works from me.
I love that git gives me a) a bag of commits forming one or more rooted trees, b) symbolic names for commits/branches that resolve to individual commits in that bag.
That's such a simple model.
Remotes. Commits. Branches/tags. That's it.
Merging and rebasing merely create new anonymous branches in the bag of commits, then move a branch name (if applicable) to point to the new HEAD. Done. Trivial.
The reflog is just a local log of actions taken, and can be used to quickly recover from missteps: just find a HEAD you want as your branch's head, and then git branch -f branch <commit>.
The index/staging area are very, very useful, mostly because of git add -e, which is extremely powerful. This lets me split up my commits usefully.
Just about everything else is stuff you can figure out as you go.
The only thing you can ever lose in git (short of doing rm -rf .git) is workspace content that you have not added to the index or committed. Stay away from git reset unless you know what you're doing with it, and all is good.
Being able to think of the state of the repo as a tree of anonymous commits, with a name resolution table for resolving branches/tags to commits, makes doing complex tasks trivial for me. I often rebase in detached head mode and nothing goes wrong; when I'm done I manually move/create a branch to the new HEAD -- I can do this because the tree-of-anon-commits model is so darned simple.
IMO, the scary UI/UX of git is holding back the use of version control for a lot of digital documents beyond just source code. It needn't be this complicated.
On the other hand, when explaining the git model to sysadmins and developers, not sugar-coating it has worked best for me. I explain the bag-of-commits+nametable design. I explain the workspace and staging area. I show how one does things. This works for me.
Maybe git's UI "needn't be this complicated", but I do find that Mercurial's heavy-duty branches lead to hell very quickly and it's always difficult to recover -- and Mercurial is supposed to be simple! The lesson is that simplifying isn't easy, and not every simplification works well generally.
With git I can simplify in that I show users a small amount of abstract concepts (bag-of-commits, nametable) and a small set of common usages and then let them learn by experience and osmosis as they reach out for help when they stray past those usages. I can't do this with other VCSes. At some point it just becomes painful.
One of the nice things about git is that I can push users to make very linear history. This is nice because diving into the history of a tangled mess of merged branches is not easy, and it's actually very confusing to non-professionals. But even for professionals, linear history is far superior to a tangled mess of merged branches, and only git really gives us that power today.
I have used git for a long time, but never arrived at such a state, apart from when I was converting existing SVN repo to git (where starting the process anew after 10 minutes of experimenting was faster than restoring refs). How did you manage to do it?
Same way everyone else manages it, including myself: abject ignorance. You and I (as a now more experienced git user) know that it is extremely unlikely to actually be in a state where blowing away the repository is necessary. Like you, I can’t think of how one would pull that off. That’s why I tell less experienced users “if you’ve committed, even just locally, you can’t lose your work without really trying. If you get in trouble, don’t use the ‘-f’ switch, and come get me, we’ll get it sorted out.
But that was not me nine years ago as I blew away the repository again because I got in a confused state (me, not git). And be honest, that was you nine years ago, too, before you wrapped your head around git.
Yet, once when I had a power failure by chance the second I fired the commit trigger... I was pretty hopeless at trying to clear up the mess of objects it exploded everywhere, I couldn't be bothered and just re-cloned the blasted thing, hope it never happens to me again.
It should not normally be a problem, but a power failure just at the wrong time seems the prime suspect to me; there's nothing in Git's logic that should normally allow for such a problem.
See, for example, the "Failure to sync" section of SQLite's page on "How to Corrupt an SQLite Database".
[1] https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html#_failure_to_sync
This type of incident is not irrecoverable, but it will hella-waste-your-fucking-time (FYI I really like git, but it's far from infallible)... Try it out and you will have a fun time following the trail of dangling objects.
My point is not that git is fundamentally flawed (fundamentally it's extremely resilient and elegant), but merely that "commit" being a porcelain command should provide a simple way to recover from arbitrary failure without having to dive deeply into the internals and plumbing commands (it's another CLI UI failure)... I knew what was wrong but it was such a pain to reconcile that I resorted to re-cloning, imagine what a confusing mess it would appear to a regular user.
If you requested save in your favorite GUI application,
text editor, etc and it popped open a select the
changes you would like to save dialog, you would
rightly think just save all my changes already,
dammit
That is, by and large, the quick sanity check of "these are the things you did?" is actually quite valuable. Regardless of any annoyance it may give. Similar to the "did you mean to print all 500 pages?" warning you can get if you print something huge. Sometimes, yes. Yes I did. Often times, no, not what I intended.
Would it though? Just finish your commit ("q" to skip the current hunk and every following one), then use commit --amend —interactive for the rest of the changes.
`git rebase -i` makes this relatively easy/nice. I think even better tools for this would make it way more realistic to get away from the staging area as step in the default 'commit' process.
Also, what if I use a remote to synchronize between different machines I work on on the same code base?
(This is a fun project because there's also a paper[2] that analyzes the design of Git from a conceptual level, and comes up with the simplifications that Gitless implements.)
[1]: http://gitless.com/ [2]: https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/10/24/whats-wrong-with-git-a-c...
- always commit everything, merge/push that (Mercurial style)
- always commit everything, then eventually do a rebase where you merge/split commits into logical units
- always git add -e then commit logical units
I do mostly the latter, but since I don't usually write code the way I want it in the end before pushing, I almost always have to go back and rebase to reorder, merge, and/or split commits prior to pushing.
Like you, I'm sympathetic to the idea of "save everything", and I emphatically agree that it's fantastic that you get to save just the changes you want because it allows one to produce minimal and logical commits.
I suspect that the author of TFA does not produce nice, clean, logical, and minimal commits. Instead I bet their upstream is full of merge commits and the merged branches are full of huge commits with lots of unrelated changes, and/or full of "fix a typo" commits that should never appear in upstream histories.
Using a VCS effectively to create clean, useful history upstream is hard, and some VCSes make it harder than others. Mercurial (and Fossil, and...) make it supremely difficult. Git makes it easy (though one does have a bit of a learning curve to get there).
Ironically, all the Merkle hash tree VCSes are git-like under the covers: there's a bag of commits, and some sort of branch name resolution. "Heavy-duty branches", like Mercurial's, are extremely confusing -- I never know how to recover from having multiple tips, and I don't even understand why that's at all possible. Whereas "light-weight" branching (like Mercurial's bookmarks, which still aren't reliable, or like git's branches, which are) is much much simpler -- even Mercurial's community gets this, though they still shy away from light-weight branches for some reason that I still don't understand. Fossil is exactly like git under the covers, except far, FAR superior to git in that it's relational -- Fossil is easily the best VCS ever in terms of implementation. But Fossil's dogma is highly opinionated and Mercurial-like: it has light-weight branches, but the UI is merge-happy like Mercurial's, and there's no rebasing (there's basic cherry-picking functionality, which of course is always the basis of rebasing, but that's it).
I really don't want a Merkle hash tree VCS to hide its tree nature from me.
And no, "just diff between merges" is NOT nice and clean. It bundles lots of changes together, therefore you can't easily separate them without actually understanding all of it. The cognitive burden of reading diffs is high. The cognitive burden of reading commit subjects and messages is lower -- much much lower.
One really does have to be considerate of the people who will be maintaining one's code in the future. Even that will be you yourself, you should still be considerate to your future self.
When you work with codebases measured in Mloc or Gloc, you really need the code and its history to be accessible. This is obvious to people who have worked with such codebases. It's less obvious to people who haven't, but it it's still true.
While currently this workflow is clunky, it could be made to work with the same nice semantics of your workflow, and not have a staging area at all.
I have seen people get in trouble with rebasing and generally while manipulating history but never with the staging area.
I think that's what mercurial tries to solve, it makes manipulating history safe (by tracking the state of the commits, whether they were published or not for example, and always keeping all the history but hiding it after it was rewritten).
I disagree with your statistic though - I can't tell you what the flag is precisely because it's almost never what I want; so I never use it and haven't learnt it.
I think these things just vary with workflow.
git commit -a
161 g cap # commit --patch --amend
170 g adu # add -u
205 g add -p # add --patch
277 g ci # commit -a
484 g cip # commit --patch
More importantly, the article is about the staging area being there by default.
It doesn't even have to go away. (And on that note, I'm bummed that the conclusion in the article is to do that, especially because everytime this comes up, there's an uproar.) But, jeez. Just tuck it away so futzing with it is an opt-in decision for the 5% of the time that you need to make sure you aren't committing all of your changes. (And on note #2, if a person is doing partially staged changes more often than that, my question is why? What kind of chaotic, stream-of-consciousness style of development leads to that, and is it even producing good results? It doesn't take especially careful planning to not end up in the scenarios where partially committed changes is the answer.)
EDIT: I suppose I have to use it to add new files :)
It's quite common to tell newcomers to always `git commit -a`, and `git add` for adding new files. That's pretty much exactly where SVN is/was, and nobody complained about that being complicated or onerous either.
I use git status -s and git diff quite a bit as a sanity check (for things like whitespace) and to do first party code review before I send anything out.
The staging area is a core part of my personal git workflow pre-commit. It seems to be producing good results so far.
You can trivially replicate that without staging by amending the HEAD commit, or building a bunch of partial commits then folding them with rebase -i. You can even do that automatically by committing with --fixup or --squash
Errr… no you're not. `commit -p` exists.
I'm used to thinking of commits as atomic commits--roughly, each commit is the smallest change that atomically makes sense. So you should be able to use the staging area to build up that commit as you find more pieces to make it in. But while I'm slowly hacking away at this commit, I talked with someone else and decided to try an idea which turns out to be a small commit. But I've already got this half-built-up commit that's staged, so I need to commit that to make the new commit, and then somehow reverse the patches and restage the commit (which is something that's well outside my git comfort level).
What hg has is a few different features that make it possible to build up not just a single commit but an entire commit sequence and do operations on that commit sequence (like reorder them). The git staging area is kind of a weak version of that, but it ends up being in limbo: too complex for the simple just-commit-everything model but too simple for try-to-craft-the-public-changelog model.
Edit: the model I adapted to from my hg workflows is effectively commit --amend. Mercurial has an interesting way of doing history tracking such that if I really need to, I can actually follow the history of the "oops, I need to change these commit because I missed a compiler failure" or "I forgot to save this file before committing," which is a feature that git doesn't have. If you promoted amending the last commit, you wouldn't need a staging area to build up a commit, the last commit does it for you already.
> What hg has is a few different features that make it possible to build up not just a single commit but an entire commit sequence and do operations on that commit sequence (like reorder them).
Again, I've never used hg (beyond a simple tutorial), but you can commit frequently with git (every few other changes "WIP") and reorder / fuse / edit later through interactive rebase.
I would highly suggest reading Pro Git [0], a well written book on not only how to use git, but also the best practices, common workflows, and some of the internals in to how git works. Many refer to it as the essential book on git.
To clean up outgoing changes, you can run an interactive rebase of the current branch onto its remote tracking counterpart. This will list all affected commits in a text editor, and allows you to reorder, squash, change the commit message or the content, much like how you describe it works in hg: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rebase#_interactive_mode
I'm confused about what you think --amend is lacking. If you want a full history including amendments, why not make real commits? In case you need it git can track the original edit-showing history of something too, it's just awkward. Do you think more people would use it if it was easy?
Also if you really want to uncommit and restage it's a simple command to write down. (reset --soft HEAD^)
I recommend learning about the combination of `git gui` (including its amend option), `git rebase -i`, and `git commit --squash=/--fixup=` (and don't forget to set `git config --global rebase.autosquash true`).
The workflow in Git could still be improved: `git gui` should really allow you to create "squash!" commits more comfortably, for example (I often end up staging with `git gui` and committing on the command-line).
Also, it would be awesome to have an editor in which you could make edits to selected commits directly in a rebase-like fashion. But I don't think that exists for any version control system out there, and getting the UI right for dealing with conflicts would be quite challenging.
The other is that it destroys history, you change the record of what actually happened to the version that is a plausible simplification in the opinion of git's diff/merge heuristic. You then can't then go back for to look for explanations of bugs or test code changes, which change happened first or whether a fact claimed by a commit message was really true at the time, or where is some change a merge mess-up or considered change.
Rebase also really complicates the mental model of git you have to work with.
I appreciate though, that there are cases where you want to withhold the record of what actually happened and use squash/rebase, it's a type of privacy from others. But simply grouping together commits into one is not a good reason to do it, that's what merge commits are for after all.
How is this hard to recover? You have full control of both copies, the system protects you against data loss, and you can easily pick one of the two, rebase one against the other, etc. to recover.
> Which can happen in many situations, eg github merge button, even without other people involved
This is the real problem and it's DVCS agnostic. If you make a bunch of changes to the same code without staying current, a human is going to have to reconcile it. If you follow recommended practice and update your local changes against the shared upstream regularly, this is a far more manageable problem — and that's true for every version control system in existence.
> The other is that it destroys history, you change the record of what actually happened to the version that is a plausible simplification in the opinion of git's diff/merge heuristic.
More correctly, you change it to the version as presented by the human who made the decision to rebase. If someone chooses to remove important context you can have problems but that's the same category of social problem you'd have with someone who uses poor commit messages, makes commits which are incomplete, etc.
> Rebase also really complicates the mental model of git you have to work with.
I find the opposite to be true. Most of the people I've taught seem to quickly grasp the idea that a rebase is simply taking your set of changes and moving them to apply against the current shared consensus rather than that state when you started, whereas merges cause regular confusion during code review or conflicts when people are asked to reason about changes someone else made.
Git stash
> What hg has is a few different features that make it possible to build up not just a single commit but an entire commit sequence and do operations on that commit sequence (like reorder them). The git staging area is kind of a weak version of that...
The git way is to make a new branch and then use git rebase -i
git add -p # select what to add to the staging area
git reset -p # deselect chunks that I decided I don't want anymore
git stash # saves your working state in a temporary commit (not in your branch)
git stash pop # restores the working state from the last git stash command and drops the temporary commit
git rebase -i $start_point # where $start_point is either a branch or some commit in your branch history. -i means interactive, which allows you to reorder/edit/reword/squash commits
git checkout -b $newbranch $start_point # you can make a new branch at any commit in history, so if you decide to reorder your commits, then declare and older commit as a branch and get it merged first, that's fine. $start_point is optional, if unspecified the current HEAD commit is used.
git commit -m 'WIP idea 1'
git checkout -b idea-2 HEAD~1 # makes a new branch at the parent of the HEAD commit
git add -p # pull in the desired changes
git commit -m 'idea2 implementation'
git checkout idea-1
git add -p # stage the rest of the changes
git commit --amend
git rebase idea2 # if idea 1 depends on idea 2
You could use the "fast-forward with merge commit" style. [1] Then you can treat the commits from the branch as sub-commits, and the merge commit as the parent commit.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15631890/how-to-achieve-...
A clean git log view that shows only meta-commits
Git blame shows both the meta-commit and the sub-commit for each line
git log --merges
Does rebase -i handle this adequately or am I misunderstanding what you're describing here? My workflow sounds like exactly what you're saying here, where "subcommits" are my development commits and the UX is the rebase -i editor.
Just:
- edit files - git add -e - optionally git diff --staged (to review what will go in a commit) - optionally lather, rinse, repeat as needed - git commit
Alternatively:
- edit files - git add - git commit - lather, rinse, repeat - git rebase -i origin/master (or whatever) and reorder/squash/edit/split commits as needed
For the latter's last step, sometimes the easiest thing to do is to squash all commits when you're done, then git reset HEAD^, then apply the git add -e && git commit loop in order to break up your work into logical commits.
When done, push.
The basic problem is that git was designed to solve Linus’s problems, and Linus’s problems are not your problems. However, because of network effects, most of us end up using the same tool.
If I’ve got a big change which I want to split into three small internally consistent changes, with each change overlapping in many files, how in the world would --amend help?
> I like the ability to make a big, complex change and checkpoint stable portions (subsets) of the work as I go.
However, it does not replace all use cases of the staging area, which is why I gave it only as an example.
Of course, `commit --amend` with `-p` could solve your problem as well.
Alternatively, “create a new, 'pending’ commit, without a commit message, don’t point HEAD to it yet, and change most of the commit-related commands to modify this commit until it is finalized” also solves all the use cases of the staging area, because that is what the staging area is, but it is presented in a much more confusing way and ends up being yet another new concept for git beginners to grasp.
After thinking about this more, I find myself agreeing that in terms of beginner friendliness, the combination of incredible name confusion and the relative paucity of use cases where it’s necessary make the staging area an interesting area for significant change in the git defaults.
There are ways to do this using stash but if you stash before you commit, you get merge conflicts when you pop the stash. The workaround I've seen is to commit before you stash, but that means you're also committing before you've actually tested that change, which seems pretty broken, IMHO.
When you're done:
git checkout master
git merge --squash <branch_name>
git commit -m "<Real commit message here>"
If you have lots of unrelated uncommitted changes in the current repository and want to split up the commit, how can you easily check if the changes passes the test suite? With all the other unrelated changes it can be hard to make sure that only relevant changes becomes part of the commit, and that they don't result in regressions. This script clones the repository to the directory ".testadd.tmp" in the current directory and applies the staged changes there (unless -u/--unmodified or -p/--pristine is specified), chdirs to the same relative directory in the clone and executes the command specified on the command line there.
It's available from
https://github.com/sunny256/utils/blob/master/git-testadd
and the test suite (place it in a subdirectory below the script) is at
https://github.com/sunny256/utils/blob/master/tests/git-test...
It's stable, and I've been using it almost every day for 1.5 years. It also works with binary files.
I'd be happier if the staging area was handled at the filesystem level, give me a directory which at all times contains the staging area, so I can test it.
--staged is already an alias for --cached in the latest Git version.
The driving features of Git's successor will be unrelated to Git UI gripes. If Git's UI gripes were important enough, people would just be using Mercurial (which has it's own quirks). The biggest problems I've personally seen with Git are the same problems you see with other VCS, where two people change the same file, and one commits the changes first. Now you have to merge the changes and sometimes it's a pain in the ass when you just want to submit your changes and go home. A better VCS isn't going to solve that!
I'm still glad that Git delivered me from all the merging problems that SVN had, although I've heard that SVN is a little better these days.
Git has good documentation too. As long as we're doing personal experience, here's mine: I learned git from `git help` too (well, `git --help` and `git <command> --help`), and I never needed to look for a git expert in my team for advanced operations; I did have to be one for others quite a few times , but when it wasn't an immediate, pressing concern I could just point to the appropriate manual.
> Git has good documentation too.
hilarious. Git has a sprawling mess of disorganised man pages. I find calling that "good documentation" insulting to people who care about documenting things.
This is extremely unfounded. You're basically just making shit up with baseless platitudes.
Perhaps that's unfair to the documentation in that it does a good job of detailing commands and their options, but is urinating into a hurricane as far as trying to convey any notion of conceptual integrity for a piece of software that has none.
I wish all the software I use had a documentation half as good as this one.
It might!
I feel like a "language aware" VCS would be able to help a lot in this area.
I know there are 3rd party tools that can do this, but if a VCS came along that natively knew about some languages it could unlock some really cool features.
Imagine instead of your VCS storing the text source, it stores the AST! Language aware means it can also integrate tightly with language package managers.
VCS would have to be much more than "language aware" to even begin to help in this area.
Absolutely, although hopefully it'll be implemented using langserver or similar.
Conversely, I think programming languages (and code- and configuration-generators) of the future will be judged in part on how VCS-friendly they are. A few smart decisions when designing syntax could make diffs smaller and conflicts easier to resolve. (This kind of change would, I am convinced, also make experimental changes to code easier--think rewriting SQL queries to make them faster.)
For now, I've been adapting my own coding style over time to be more VCS friendly. It's made my life easier and has indeed made making experimental changes easier to boot.
While struggling to search for this tool, I discovered https://www.gmaster.io: a beta Git client (for Windows) from the same company extending these ideas closer to the VCS level.
Codice Software's main product appears to be PlasticSCM; they've done a bit of marketing here on HN without catching much interest.
There's a lot of stuff that doesn't get checked in; I wouldn't necessarily want it all in the official history but it would be amazing to have a time-searchable view of the project's entire development story for my own personal review/rescue operations.
- "production"
The merge should happen far before it hits production.
Maybe I'm taking you too literally or something.
Do you have a CI/CD pipeline?
* Make changes
* Run tests
* Code review
* Submit changes
CI pipeline will run larger integration tests, make releases, and deploy to production. We can cherry pick commits to fix bugs at this point. The pipeline will roll out releases to the development environment on a nightly schedule and to production on a weekly using canaries.
You can’t submit if your changes don’t merge cleanly. You’ll need to fix the changes and re-run tests (can be slow) at the minimum.
If you don’t submit by end of Wednesday you have to wait another week.
Lots of people hate git's UI, but it let's you do all sorts of workflows. You can rebase a lot, or merge a lot, or both. With Fossil you're pretty much stuck with a merge workflow.
What makes Fossil superior to all other VCSes is that internally it is a Merkle hash tree organized relationally, with an internal SQL interface. This makes a) development of tools much easier than for any other VCS, b) much easier to write new kinds of queries and make them perform well.
Perhaps some other VCS will come along that will do what Fossil does, but with a less opinionated UI.
I understand why Fossil is opinionated: it's not meant to be a VCS to take over the world, but instead just a VCS for SQLite3 and related projects. As such its developers don't really care for any functionality that they themselves don't care for, and thus my need for rebasing, and a staging area / index, is as nothing to them. I can't blame them, really, but it would be truly fantastic if we could support rebase workflows with Fossil.
Another thing I don't like about Fossil is its approach to repo sync. I like that with git I can push/fetch individual branches/tags, some of them, or all of them. With Fossil you don't get much choice, as it's all public branches or nothing.
Power users (and I'm not saying here that Fossil's aren't) need more UI power. To appeal more widely, a VCS as to support more power users.
If your instinctive response is to defend Git, boost Mercurial, ridicule people who can't use their tools, ridicule the tools for being unusable, or whatever -- suppress it for a while and give this article some thoughtful attention.
If collaborate, it would be nice to lower the barrier to participation ... more like Wikipedia. I know that I often don't bother to submit a PR for small changes bc of the overhead of setup. Whereas I fairly often make small edits to Wikipedia changes, because it's so easy.
I've seen this lead to confusion where people fork a repo and send PRs even though they have contributor rights, because they didn't understand the difference. As an extreme example: https://github.com/flystack/misty/pull/101 - This is a repo with only one person with write access [1]. Yet this same person only commits to their private fork of this repo and sends himself PRs that he then immediately merges. I don't mean to blame the developer, only the Github UX.
[1] It says "6 contributors" on the mainpage of the repo, but four of these are from my team and we definitely don't have write access.
That's an orthogonal concern. What they're saying is what the essay suggests at the end, Github could maintain a list of "contributor refs" in the source repository in the same way they expose PR refs (refs/pull/*/head).
This could be managed entirely by the service provider (e.g. github) and invisible to the repository maintainer until a PR is created.
I had hope that GitLab would take the opportunity to fix most of the problems GitHub introduced (or at least a few), but they seem to be interested in just copying the mistakes and chasing the market segment made up of people who's only criteria begins and ends with like GitHub, but on-prem.
git clone https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
[... edit & commit ...]
git push # Github automatically creates and pushes to a branch called qznc/master
[ one more click to open a pull request ]
(And, I might add, probably not by Hg either if it requires enabling an extension...)
Anyway, hg show work looks like an interesting thing. It's perhaps a bit more magic than Git usually goes for, since you can't just show all DAG sinks (it would get messy really quickly with amends and rebases). And I don't think I'd benefit too much from it, since I've come to prefer having all my work-in-progress on a single branch. But I can see how someone could appreciate the feature.
"Not well supported" in this context means that you can lose data (as commits that are not reachable from a ref can be garbage collected). Mind you, you have to ignore warnings/errors to get there, but without ignoring them, you also won't be able to actually have anonymous branches.
> (And, I might add, probably not by Hg either if it requires enabling an extension...)
It does not require an extension. The `show` extension that Greg talks about is a smart log display, which shows a contextual log for your current work. Anonymous branches have been part of Mercurial from the beginning, long before the `show` extension existed.
For what it's worth, it's not so much that Mercurial supports it, but that Git doesn't. Git is rather unique in its setup in this regard. No other VCS that I know of uses garbage collection and in particular branches to prevent revisions from being garbage collected. (Some may require you to name branches for other reasons, but not so you don't lose commits.)
It's probably also worth noting that we have an implementation detail leaking into user space here. Git uses what is essentially purely functional data structures underneath to achieve atomicity in the absence of an actual database engine [1]; a different implementation, such as on top of SQLite, could avoid this.
[1] Atomicity here is not about locking, but about a transaction being interrupted by the user or an external event, such as a shutdown.
Question: How does Mercurial deal with garbage collection? After all, the desire for garbage collection is by far not unique to Git -- any version control system that has the equivalent of `commit --amend` and rebase should provide it.
As for not needing the extension, it seems to me that having "dangling" commits would be very difficult to use without some decent visualization of the dangling commits, such as what the blog post shows with `hg show`.
> It's probably also worth noting that we have an implementation detail leaking into user space here.
I find this comment absolutely fascinating, because truly, this is not an implementation detail leak at all.
The point of the purely functional data structures isn't to achieve atomicity (although potentially being a bit more robust to power loss etc. is certainly a nice side effect), it's a way of thinking about version control. I've never heard functional programmers use atomicity as the main argument for immutable data structures, either...
The whole point of Git's design is that it chose a robust and crystal clear way of thinking about distributed versioning as its underlying model of what version control is, and then simply provided tools for manipulating that DAG. Some of those are a bit ugly because of how the system grew over time, but still, this is how software should be designed: have a clear model of what the data is, then provide tools for manipulating it.
For what it's worth, the underlying data store of Git could quite easily support "unnamed" tip commits as well. What you'd need is a change in the garbage collection policy, and "porcelain". Which brings me back to the question of how Mercurial does it.
Garbage collecion is an issue that is 100% unique to Git. No other VCS even thinks about throwing user data in the repository away without the user explicitly telling it to. Once you have a user telling you to throw the data away, it can do that. There is no need for GC; this is purely an artifact of Git's implementation. I'm honestly not sure why you think you'd even need a GC for `hg commit --amend` or `hg rebase` (or similar operations in other VCSes).
> As for not needing the extension, it seems to me that having "dangling" commits would be very difficult to use without some decent visualization of the dangling commits, such as what the blog post shows with `hg show`.
I'm not sure where you get the idea. This feature is, after all, not unique to Mercurial. It's Git that has the oddball semantics that no other VCS on earth has. Mercurial has been able to graphically show the graph for ages and the ability to just list open heads, too (`hg heads`). If you look at the code, the implementation of the show command is largely just a templated graphlog of a particular revset. For example, `hg wip` [1] (for "work in progress") has been doing something similar just using revsets and templates from core Mercurial.
> The point of the purely functional data structures isn't to achieve atomicity (although potentially being a bit more robust to power loss etc. is certainly a nice side effect), it's a way of thinking about version control. I've never heard functional programmers use atomicity as the main argument for immutable data structures, either...
This is because functional languages do not have to worry about their state being destroyed by the user hitting Control-C or a power outage. This will simply terminate the program, whereas for Git it will interrupt a transaction in progress.
> The whole point of Git's design is that it chose a robust and crystal clear way of thinking about distributed versioning as its underlying model of what version control is, and then simply provided tools for manipulating that DAG.
This is what other version control systems do, too, without relying on purely functional data structures. The fact that the data structures are purely functional is, after all, not a property that is visible to the user other than through the side effects of garbage collection.
[1] http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l...
Maybe you don't call it GC, but doing a rebase in Git leaves the old, pre-rebase version around. That is a feature: over the years, it has happened to me more than once that I'd missed something when resolving complex conflicts during the rebase. Being able to refer back to the state from before the rebase was very helpful in these cases.
If Mercurial throws the old version away unconditionally, that would suck very much indeed.
If Mercurial keeps the old version, then perhaps at some point in the future I'd really rather have all that old data removed as a simple matter of saving disk space. Surely nobody wants to do that manually?
Hence: you either have a system that makes it much easier than Git to lose data, or you need garbage collection.
I don't know what Mercurial does, but somehow, the fact that this dilemma isn't obvious to you -- somebody who clearly seems to know a lot about Mercurial -- doesn't instill a lot of confidence in it.
Which is why it isn't done.
In core Mercurial, the old revisions are stored in a backup bundle in a separate backup directory. Note that bundles can transparently be used as read-only repositories, so you can view their logs as though they were still part of the parent repo, diff against them, pull from them, etc.
With the evolve extension, those revisions will simply be marked as obsolete, with obsolescence markers showing which revisions were replaced by which. The commits will be hidden, but are still part of the repository. If you ever want to get rid of the old revisions, you'd have to use (say) `hg strip -r 'exctinct()'`, which would store them as bundles as described above, or clone the repository and delete the old repository.
Plus, there are public, draft, and secret changesets. Public changesets are immutable and cannot be changed without user override.
Bazaar rebase will simply hide the old revisions; you can recover them with `bzr heads --all`. To permanently delete the revisions, you have to clone the repository and delete the old version (and all backups). And, of course, there's rarely a reason to use rebase in Bazaar.
> Hence: you either have a system that makes it much easier than Git to lose data, or you need garbage collection.
As I described above, neither. In every case, you need to go through several steps each requiring the user to affirmatively express their desire to delete data.
And as disk space is really cheap these days, hardly anyone ever actually deletes the data in practice, as there's no point to it.
> I don't know what Mercurial does, but somehow, the fact that this dilemma isn't obvious to you -- somebody who clearly seems to know a lot about Mercurial -- doesn't instill a lot of confidence in it.
I think your dilemma is largely an imaginary one, fretting over a resource (disk space) that is too plentiful to require micromanagement.
Keep in mind that most of the data in your repository will come from other people; there's only so much source code or text that a single person can write in a day. If you're generating massively large binary assets, a DVCS is probably the wrong tool, anyway, because of scaling concerns. This inherently limits the amount of "wasted" data that you can have in a repository to a percentage of the repository size.
I think the need for GC in git is likely also tied to its original resource intensive implementation. Pack files were added to fix that, but then you need to GC the blobs to prevent storage blowup.
Mercurial and most other VCS have delta storage as their base format which avoids this issue.
All of this depends on me knowing what happens inside git and the git insides being rather simple (a hash tree with a handful of object types); I think I would like Mercurial (or any other DVCS) much more if I knew the same about it: can someone suggest places where this is described?
Sadly github and CI systems provide community tools around git not mercurial (mercurial is an afterthought at best in most CI systems). Those community tools are compelling enough that I'm switching to an inferior system just to get them.
I really like Gregory's discussion about nameless workflows. For small side projects I use Git on a personal server and I don't care to name every change or even use branches. I essentially just want my work sync'd remotely and maybe -- maybe -- I'll look at the history, but almost never. I used to use tar/scp for this before I got worried about overwriting local/remote changes.
I use Git for this now and guess what, my commits are all '.'. I blatantly don't care, and some commits I'm rewriting the entire source tree in a day (like I said, small side projects) so the message would be "Old version sucked, rewrote" and there would be 20 of them.
Mostly this is because I don't care to waste my brain power on managing my changes. That's what I'm using a VCS for. They don't need summaries -- that's what diffs are for -- and they certainly don't need names.
Gregory's argument against forks makes sense to me too. Semantically a fork doesn't really sync back up with the main branch; if it does it's pretty rare -- or just look at the terminology here: branch, root, trunk... FORK. Fork doesn't really go there.
If there's a "create" command, it's "modify" counterpart is likely to be "create -b -u -t --modify", and it's "delete" counterpart is likely to not exist at all or be an arcane incantation of several non-related commands and a push.
Unfortunately, most GUI tools are just thin wrappers on top of all this mess (with the possible exception of GitUp whose abstractions are also paper-thing at times)
I do think the git model is superior to Mercurial's, by far.
I also find the git commands much, much easier to use than Mercurial's, unless I stop caring about having meaningful commits.
With Mercurial I end up just committing lots of work in one go, with minimal logical splitting, and that's that. The Mercurial repos I share with others are full of useless (to me) merge commits because no one can bother rebasing as rebasing is not as easy on Mercurial.
With git I can spend the effort of making clean, logical commits and rebasing so that no one need see pointless internal-to-my-way-of-working commits. I can do this because git does not hide its internals from me. I know git is a pile of anonymous commits that form trees, with branches and tags as symbolic names that resolve to specific commits in the pile.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910094 in this same thread for more on how the git model is natural.
But after using gitkraken (or similar products) I will never go back to using git through its command line interface. Being able to see the whole repo structure is just so much more convenient and it helps to resolve most merging problems much faster. git guis all have their own problems, but overall using a git gui for me is the better choice in 95% of all use cases.
I agree that the default git porcelain leaves something to be desired. Personally I use and absolutely love magit, slightly tweaked to give me the defaults I want.
The staging area is one of the things that magit really improves on; you retain all its power while making it very cheap to use -- one keystroke to stage the selected file, or all modified files. I stage individual hunks à la `git add --patch` a lot, and sometimes need to include only part of the hunk I'm presented with. It wasn't uncommon for my editing the diff to result in an error with the git cli, now I select the lines I need and just stage those. And if you really don't want to use it, `--all` is easily set as a default for committing.
In particular, named branches significantly reduce friction in my day-to-day work. I often have PRs for multiple smallish tickets in flight simultaneously, working on the code for each ticket while I wait for review on the others. This means that branches generally live for about eight hours and I care about maybe three of them at any given time, a different set every day. Invocations are stable, named refs fit in cache and my CLI does fuzzy LRU to improve that further, and I can bounce to the current code for a given ticket/PR at almost the speed of thought. By contrast, the "view the log and copy-paste a hash" workflow makes me cringe - I have to inspect the log every time I want to bounce to the code for a PR, and the invocation to go to a PR changes four times a day? I agree that that that makes sense if you have thirty long-running PRs open at any given time and you don't have brainpower to remember branches anyway, and that's very reasonable for a big open-source project, but that's not all use cases.
Takeaway from this story can be Magit. It totally changed my perception of git, and felt like more robust and semantically better way to use/understand git. Maybe it was like that because of few years of terminal git usage, don’t know how will complete beginner react to magit. But what shocked me the most was how my approach to git changed with dofferent interface. GUIs never appealed to me, but magit represented the middle ground of GUI like functionality with terminal like interface that got many things semantically right.
+1 for Magit. When I discovered it is when I discovered git. I assume tig must be similar although I've never looked into it but...
With magit, from my editor, I can easily check: my git status, choose which hunks to stage or unstage, commit easily. I can switch branches with less than 10 keystrokes. etc. But to me, what's coolest about it is that I can easily see commit histories and graps for branches, files, and the repo. With less than 5 keystrokes. And I can navigate these histories easily. Finally !!! Same story for pushing, pulling, merging, rebasing.
Which all of this you can do in CLI obviously. But Magit makes it easy, and because now I have everything I need with regards to git just a few keystrokes away, I can interact with git easily. So I do it.
If hg supports to strip a remote repo, it would be just fantastic!
hg evolve is awesome and topics are fantastic, but a `hg strip <remote-url>` would remove the need for any of these and help me keep my simple histedit, strip, push loop intact!
2. The general recommendation would be to use `hg prune` (part of the evolve extension) instead. Pruning commits will just hide the pruned commits and pushing will then send the obsolescence markers for those commits to the server, hiding them there, too. This is an append-only operation, so it's cheap and works well even with multiple users.
3. In general, though, it is a problem that Git and Mercurial treat remote branches/repositories as second class citizens. This is something that Bazaar got right: Bazaar abstracts over the storage, so (except where limited by network performance) you can do pretty much anything on a remote branch/repo that you can do locally.
> The Git staging area doesn't have to be this complicated. A re-branding away from index to staging area would go a long way. Adding an alias from git diff --staged to git diff --cached
I dislike the mess of crappy synonyms too, but git diff --staged is already an alias, in fact it's the primary way I diff the staging area because it's a well fitting synonym.
Problematically it's very little used, it's only mentioned once at the very tail end of the `—cached` description, `--cached` is still the primary flag, and the essay remains correct that references throughout the documentation are inconsistent.
It's not exactly hard to miss, if e.g. you learn git through the Pro Git book, the option is not mentioned once, and even the full text search has not indexed it.
Furthermore, there are many other commands which take a —cached flag but don't have a —staged alias (diff-index, submodule, check-attr, apply, rm)
They seem like straightforward problems.
I understand the reference, but is there more to this comment than a joke?
Thousands of yes! `git commit -a` just doesn't add the untracked files it is the most annoying misfeature of any version control system. Oh, I added unwanted project directories? I would then just remove them and put them to `.gitignore`, or create a `.gitignore` prior to `init`.
Of course I could just alias `add -A . && commit -m` on every machine I ever connect to for developing. There's a great, practical solution.
Maximally practical or not, if you don't already have a repository for configuration files, shell scripts, aliases, and other little quality of life enhancements then create one today. Your git workflow isn't the only thing that will benefit.
Next time you're hassled to do yet another "git config --global user.name" compare it to the hypothetical overhead of typing "git clone foo/homedir.git ~/homedir && ~/homedir/prep" to get both your name and aliases setup.
I never thought I needed a dotfile repo, but once I made it I realized I waited way too long. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just take 10 minutes and lay the groundwork to help yourself develop more quickly.
Perhaps there is a better alternative to saving and loading your dotfiles?
I use GIT when I am forced to, but for everything under my control, SVN works the best.
I was unaware you could get rid of the staging area in GIT. I may need to look more into that.
[0] https://outdoorsexperienceonline.files.wordpress.com/2013/07... [1] https://www.archery360.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/tradit...
But... I do seem to get a lot of annoying conflicts that require resolution though. Git just works, though does having a bigger learning curve
git init
git clone
git checkout
git commit
git commit -m
git commit —amend
git rebase
git add/rm/diff [—cached]
git push
git branch
and a few more I can’t remember exactly.
I try to keep my git workflow simple. The most complex is probably checkout abd rebase with several different branches.
The recent post and hype about the Facebook, Google and Microsoft monorepos should make us ask the question what our systems for source control is supposed to do really.
save changes to a source code
save changes to big binary assets
annotate those changes
annotate the files themselves
tagging versions
signing of code
code review
handle regressions testing
collaborating (ACL, DCVS, official monkey patching etc)
merging
search on the whole code base
refactoring on large code bases
Rebase as a tool is not inherently bad but it is definitely not simpler than merge - it introduces additional considerations, requires a deeper understanding of git for effective use and is a dangerous tool in the hands of people who do not understand what it is doing and in my experience most teams that are using it as a core part of their workflow are doing so for the wrong reasons (generally because of a fundamental misunderstanding of how branching and merging works in git and why it works that way).
As soon as a tree is pushes, those changes become public, and you need to explicitly force the history rewriting operations.
This is part of the " safe defaults" approach of mercurial.
> > it introduces additional considerations, requires a deeper understanding of git for effective use and is a dangerous tool in the hands of people who do not understand what it is doing
I am taught git with rebase (though merge when I use hg) so I am already too used to it. Branching then rebase is not that difficult if you keep your workflow consistent and quick iteration. You should be up to date whenever possible. Amending and rewriting history/comment also requires using rebase.
YMMV.
Rebase is basically just cherry picks. You can rewind a branch and then cherry-pick, so that the picks are non-fastforward. That's rewriting history. Cherry picking without rolling back is fastforward, and so doesn't rewrite history.
The Gerrit review system on top of Git is based on cherry-picking; it doesn't rewrite history.
If some developers are collaborating on a feature which is on a branch, they could agree from time to time to rebase that branch to a newer mainline.
Whether or not that is done by a history rewrite simply hinges on whether the same branch name is used for the rebased branch or not. The rebase is what it is: if you plant that rewrite as the original branch name, then you have a non-fastforward change. If a new branch name is made, then it isn't a rewrite.
Merging a feature branch onto a trunk can always be done in a fastforward way using rebase/cherry-pick.
Rebasing is provably simpler than merge. Merge depends on complications in the git object representation which could be removed while rebase remains what it is. If you only ever rebase, you never see a commit with multiple parents; the feature is superfluous and turns git histories into hairballs.
Rebase might give you a "simpler" end result in terms of what the history looks like but conceptually it is much less simple in terms of its mechanism and its implications (e.g. rebasing a branch with multiple contributors screws up the audit trail as it now looks like they made their changes at a different time and in a different context to when they actually did) than the idea of a graph with two branches and a merge commit.
I have seen teams with limited git experience switch from habitually rebasing public branches to accepting merge commits and suddenly cure a whole host of workflow problems.
If you can rebase directly onto a fresh branch (not something I've seen) then I am fairly sure that that's not part of your average workflow - establishing new branches every time you want to update from trunk comes with its own communication overhead too.
In hierarchical logs, a merge commit stands for the series of commits that are being merged. You can then unfold such commits and view the series of commits as a nested list of commits (which may again contain merge commits).
Think of a merge commit as the equivalent of a procedure call where the procedure body is the series of commits being merged.
(Note that there are other ways to visualize version graphs with merge commits; this is just the simplest way to do it and could actually be easily added on top of Git.)
Rebasing has two problems. It discards the original version structure and it can create commits that never build or don't pass tests (because they never existed as such).
Frequent use of rebasing is almost always an indication that a VCS is lacking important functionality.
None of that information is too relevant. If you have the commits individually cherry picked in your stream, that's most of the info you ever need about those commits. There is some earlier version of those commits in a different stream, where they look different. Usually, who cares.
The way to track that is some sort of additional meta-data. An example of this is the Gerrit Change-ID.
> git rebase
Yeah... :)
I find this simpler and cleaner than introducing a series of merge commits in my local branch.
When we go back and view those changes, they are all in terms of this codebase, not the original changes that do not apply cleanly to this codebase. That's a big problem with git merges: the merge itself is one huge jump that collapses all the changes. The original changes are traceable in its lineage through the second parent, but those are the verbatim original changes, not the merged changes.
- git add -e
- git rebase -i --autostash <upstream>
- git checkout -f -- <file> (to undo changes)
- git diff/log (of course)
- git reset HEAD^ (to undo the head commit but leave its changes extant in the workspace so I can then git add -e and commit them in logical units)
I'd suggest that there are other tools for this, such as a properly configured ZFS setup which are atomic beyond most users widest dreams (especially if all the versions of a vim .swp file are retained).
If you just want versions, yes, git gets in your way, because git is about control. Yes if you have all those versions you could go back and 'squash' them into a commit, but can you imagine trying to bisect those to find a bug?!
Somehow I also get the feeling that this perspective is similar to that of a friend who really didn't like the idea of pulling, and that he should just be able to push to the remote repository. A seeming lack of awareness of the collaborative side of version control and development.
Git isn't just about control, it is also about providing additional provenance information and context needed in order to understand what code does and the reasons why changes were made. Sometimes in order to get there we have a bunch of low intention commits that we use to checkpoint, and let's be honest, how many have created commits that put a tree in a broken state? I know I have.
The bit about making the documentation more consistent in its use of vocabulary seems like something that will have a couple of pull requests by the morning.
tl;dr If you want versions use ZFS if you want control and communication use git. Talking defaults is always a good exercise. with and EDIT: show work would be amazing ...
edit2: I just don't see the workspaces model passing the bag of dicks test. I want to code, I don't want to have to become a community moderator and clean up people committing all sorts of crap to my project and on the other side I just wan't to code and not have to deal with the bags of dicks who are going to gate keep their projects. There are just too many social edge cases and the differences are mostly just semantic (iirc the way github implements forks is basically as workspaces anyway...). That said, I would really like it to be possible to have pull requests be part of the repo history instead of, say, the listserv.
> Most people see version control as an obstacle standing in the way of accomplishing some other task. They just want to save their progress towards some goal. In other words, they want version control to be a save file feature in their workflow.
That was horrifying to me. We _religiously_ have a JIRA-XXX tag in our commits so that every commit has some kind of perspective in addition to the comment. This has been extremely useful in getting more context of why something was changed when dealing with a long lived project spanning multiple developers. Even if the commit message itself is weak or lazy we still have the user story in JIRA to get full context.
That would be so much nicer than the current need to fork.
- Offline? Looks like you'll have to wait to make that change or any other change for that matter since you can't check out files if you're offline. When doing remote work this use to do my head in.
- TFS On Premise putting readonly locks on every file you have. Why? Great question. Made writing build scripts and their ilk much harder to accomplish.
- Want to make a branch? That'll be an entire copy of the source code times however many branches you want
I find TFS the slowest of the lot, by quite a large margin.
My ranking is Perforce > Git > TFS > SVN. I haven't used Mercurial. I like Perforce the best because of its clean UI, its explicit checkout mechanism (all files are read-only by default, and you have to check out anything before you can edit), the integration tool GUI, and the ability to cloud-save work without submitting it. TFS is nice because it has built-in code review, but the UI isn't nearly as clean as Perforce.