Re: Git drawbacks?

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 10, 2009, 14:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20091110140428.GL27126@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20091110T093334-810@post.gmane.org>

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 08:51:53AM +0000, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > With many other VCS, a typical policy is that you do not commit your
> > changes unless you have finished and tested them. But it means that
> > your changes are not committed and stored only in the work tree for
> > a long time. Moreover, when you eventually decide that they are good
> > enough to commit, you will produce a huge patch, which will be difficult
> > to review or to bisect history later.
> 
> oh, yes. but this is just a policy. You can make your changes on your 
> branch and commit them (for example, for review). Later someone just 
> need to integrate it on original branch. The same as with Git, 
> isn't it? The problem is just a price to branch.

With some VCSes, it is not just the cost of branch, but it is also name pollution that happens when many branches created. But even the cost of branch creation alone may be high enough to make creating small feature branches impractical. You can try to force that on developers, but they will be frustrated with that pretty soon... And then if you really want to have good and clean history, you need more than just a branch. You should be able to amend your previous commits while you work on some feature. With Git, it is trivial, you just run 'git rebase -i' and may edit some previous commits, correct comments, squash fix-ups, etc... How can you model that? By creating another branch and moving patches to it by hands... Well, it is not very productive time spending, and the cost of branch becomes even more prominent.

> BTW, once I started to talk about review, we can see that most 
> "benefits" of DVCS go away... Just because you still need some 
> central storage to save the record of this review that should 
> be available for SQA later...

I do not see how any benefit go away because of having some central storage. Most benefits are not due to that you do not have it, but due to cheap branching, easy mirroring, and flexibility in what you want to store and where...

Show 11 quoted lines

>  
> > So, you can always commit your changes as your progress to your goal and
> > review amend them later before publishing. This means that you can have
> > as many work-in-progress branches as you wish, and you do not need a
> > separate work tree for each of them -- everything can be stored in the
> > repository, and you can go to another computer, issue 'git fetch' and
> > continue your work at the exact point where you left it. So, it is very
> > flexible.
> 
> As for me, I would not to have more than 4-5 such deferred changes in the same 
> repository. Otherwise, I will be entangled finally :-)

A quick look at "What's cooking in git.git" that Junio posted a few days ago reveals that there are at least 43 branches that are cooking now and the total number of branches that have been merged to 'master' over all Git history is 3290. And Git is not the largest project out there...

Dmitry