Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

This is an artificial problem. Git has almost all the data needed to present a squashed view - all it's missing is an idea of what commit a branch pointed to throughout history, so that it can merge together commits in in the "bubbles" for presentational purposes.

It would be better to fix this, so you get nice diffs, blame etc., than deal with all the other issues rebase causes.

I'm not convinced on the bisect issue either. If your app is trivial, sure, but if the features are more complex, the squashed commits will be too chunky to narrow down as usefully as a fuller history can.

View on HN

Again rebase is there to cleanup your work, to simplify your workflow so someone not necessarily something looking the code can make sense of it.

git bisect might work ok (I haven't used it extensively) but the more important is if you made a mistake and call someone to help, to ease that person's work by presenting a trimmed though more understandable tree. You should strive to keep the branching as simple as possible, but not simpler than that (to paraphrase an infinitely more smarter man).

I'm not convinced on the bisect issue either. I've personally done a bisect spanning 10000 changesets with 50 concurrent branches at the widest point. Found the problem right away.

We follow a similar branching model. Master is kept clean. We do all development on feature branches and merge when complete. History is fully preserved. History is a mess but it works well overall.

I would argue that you want to resolve conflicts in a rebase instead of a merge. This allows you to see where the branches diverge and fix it right away, closer to the offending commits, Preventing more work from piling up around the conflict making it harder to piece what's going on.

It can mean that you fix conflicts closer to the point where they first happened, or it can mean that you have to fix the conflict in a bunch of different ways as it propagates through each successive commit. I find myself trying to outsmart the conflicts: "Ok, I know I changed such-and-such in such-and-such a way here in a few commits, so if I fix this conflict like this, then hopefully I won't have to fix that commit later..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com