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> rebase can be undone, precisely because it does not write over the old history Good point. Perhaps "rewrite history" is not the best metaphor, and does not c

by sshine 4y ago

> rebase can be undone, precisely because it does not write over the old history Good point. Perhaps "rewrite history" is not the best metaphor, and does not cover all possible git workflows. I only considered the workflows where a rebased branch is merged back onto master instead of its non-rebased variant, which loses its name, its remote copy/copies and is eventually hit by the GC. > the very idea that rewriting history is bad, came from the Fossil team in an attempt to convince people to try Fossil and cast shade on git. The resistance I've met among developers to adopt rebasing workflows with git have no knowledge of Fossil. My impression is that the main objection to such workflows is that it exceeds some developers' novelty budget [0] and that those developers generally don't read git messages and don't value the history of code to understand its current shape. [0]: https://shimweasel.com/2018/08/25/novelty-budgets https://shimweasel.com/2018/08/25/novelty-budgets

dahart 4y ago
Sorry maybe I got a little ranty there. Rewrite history is an okay metaphor, not great but nothing super wrong with it as an approximation. And you're totally right, there is definitely resistance to rebase outside of Fossil, and even within the git community with people who've never heard of Fossil. Git does have a steep learning curve and a bumpy interface that most people (including yours truly) never get all the way through. FWIW, my intro to rebase came after using Perforce for years. Because git is strict about commit ordering and P4 is not, I was struggling to figure out how to manage multiple in-flight changes like I would in P4, and how to clean up and push something that wasn't a hot mess. Rebasing my local workspace, it turned out, is the answer to that. It is the key to working around git's strict commit parentage, and makes it easy to sculpt changes so they're palatable for me and my team. Above I was referring to some of the anti-rebase messaging Fossil has put out in the past. Some is there still, for example https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md I'm quite pleased to see that a lot of the most hyperbolic verbiage is gone now, it used to carry on quite a bit. But that page still says rebase is "dishonest", which is a deeply ironic claim, if you catch my drift. That kind of mis-representation ruffles my feathers a little bit, but I've had discussions with the Fossil team right here on HN about it, and they have in fact been open to listening, responsive, and willing to change and improve the messaging.

by sshine 4y ago

dahart 4y ago

Sorry maybe I got a little ranty there. Rewrite history is an okay metaphor, not great but nothing super wrong with it as an approximation. And you're totally right, there is definitely resistance to rebase outside of Fossil, and even within the git community with people who've never heard of Fossil. Git does have a steep learning curve and a bumpy interface that most people (including yours truly) never get all the way through. FWIW, my intro to rebase came after using Perforce for years. Because git is strict about commit ordering and P4 is not, I was struggling to figure out how to manage multiple in-flight changes like I would in P4, and how to clean up and push something that wasn't a hot mess. Rebasing my local workspace, it turned out, is the answer to that. It is the key to working around git's strict commit parentage, and makes it easy to sculpt changes so they're palatable for me and my team. Above I was referring to some of the anti-rebase messaging Fossil has put out in the past. Some is there still, for example https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md I'm quite pleased to see that a lot of the most hyperbolic verbiage is gone now, it used to carry on quite a bit. But that page still says rebase is "dishonest", which is a deeply ironic claim, if you catch my drift. That kind of mis-representation ruffles my feathers a little bit, but I've had discussions with the Fossil team right here on HN about it, and they have in fact been open to listening, responsive, and willing to change and improve the messaging.