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How does git make programmer A want to disentangle the fix? How does git keep Programmer B from making changes against the wrong base? (Admittedly, git may mak

• jerf 17y ago
  "How does git make programmer A want to disentangle the fix?" Wrong question; the correct question is "Why does SVN make the programmer not want to disentangle the fix?" The answer is that SVN makes it a royal pain in the ass. Not impossible. Nothing is impossible. But it's a royal pain in the ass. Git makes it roughly as hard as it should be; there's a certain amount of essential complexity, but it lowers the accidental complexity to something feasible. (I use Fred Brook's "accidental" vs "essential" complexity terminology from the Mythical Man Month; if you don't know what that is, hie thee hence to amazon and acquire the Mythical Man Month.) The reason I phrase it this way is that it's really a given that the fix should be disentangled; even SVN proponents will tend to agree with this as a matter of principle. So the question is, why have we all just gotten used to not bothering? "How does git make merging easier?" Again, correct question is "How does SVN make merging hard?" and the answer is "in numerous ways". However, in git, it actually works the way it always should have worked. SVN brings way too much accidental complexity to the task of merging, which is evidenced by the way people avoid it like the plague, whereas the exact same people have no problem using git for it. "It sounds like you're handwaving!" - OK, you didn't say this but I see it coming. The answer is either Google to someone treating this subject more fully (it's not that hard to find), or try it yourself; I see no point in repeating such people's work in a limited HN comment. (Many of them have diagrams and such.) It is not comparable. It is a night-and-day difference unless you are the only person using your SVN repository, and even then git is still nicer.
• steveklabnik 17y ago
  * interactive commits let you commit only parts of what you're working on. It's really easy just to commit the lines that were involved with the fix, and leave everything else alone. * Even the best tools can be used wrong. * It makes merging easier by making it work fast and work well. There's a lot more merging, it's not painful!
• JeffJenkins 17y ago
  > How does git make programmer A want to disentangle the fix? From experience, I'd say it makes the process of doing so easier. In git you can: 1. commit a portion of the code, even a portion of a single file using git add --interactive 2. stash your current changes, re-make the change needed, commit, then unstash and keep working > How does git keep Programmer B from making changes against the wrong base? Making it easier to move the fix is exactly the point. You can't make it impossible to make mistakes, but you can make them less disastrous. Also, you can easily revert the fix in the wrong branch or remove it entirely if you haven't shared your changes. > How does git make merging easier? I was too scared to make branches in other systems, but my guess is that rebase is a significant part of it. If you're rebasing fairly frequently the changes you're making shouldn't diverge too much, and it makes the actual merges trivial. You gain a lot from being able to manipulate the history of your repository. The unfortunate thing is that the history itself isn't version controlled, so you can't manipulate the history once you've shared it with other people.