the careless committer and fear of commitment (rebase -i vs add -p)

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 30, 2010, 05:02 UTC
Message-ID: <20100330045704.GA9004@progeny.tock>
In-Reply-To: <32541b131003292132q10db3c5eh1bb6443d625fcb82@mail.gmail.com>

Avery Pennarun wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> I generally just make a temporary commit
> with "git commit", then revise it using "git commit --amend" over
> time.
> 
> Or else I make a series of commits, then *later* squash them all
> together using 'git merge --squash' or 'git rebase -i'.
> 
> It seems like the suggested feature would encourage people to do it
> the "wrong" way (not creating temporary commits, thus making it easy
> to make a mistake and blow things away) just because they aren't aware
> of the above options.
> 
> Is there a reason that these methods don't work for you?

I like ‘git diff --cached’ and ‘git diff’ to show the entire list of staged and unstaged changes. I don’t consider this “wrong” at all. Generally, once something becomes precious enough to be worth keeping, it is already in presentable form and I can come up with an appropriate commit message. I understand that other people work differently; this is just my personal preference.

I also use the stash heavily, which maybe mitigates the “content could be blown away with a simple rm -f” problem.

You might also be interested in Pasky’s analysis at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/138641/focus=138672

Cheers, Jonathan