Re: What is a reasonable mixed workflow for git/git-cvsserver?

From: Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2007, 15:06 UTC
Message-ID: <7D018B3B-CE12-46C4-87EA-9BE14EC415E4@silverinsanity.com>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90707230719i106e0576j2868548ef0cb1739@mail.gmail.com>

On Jul 23, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Martin Langhoff wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On 7/23/07, Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> wrote:
>> My question is how to deal with this shared branch on the git
>> side. Should a core developer rebuild a sane history from such
>> a shared/mixed/unsorted branch by cherry picking the commits
>> to one or more topic branches?
>
> I think that's usually frowned upon. As the committer did his/her work
> on a particular state of the tree, and tested it. So every commit at
> least *should* be of a working state. Once you rewrite history as a
> "normal" practice, that flies out of the window. And it's a big loss.

That's only somewhat true. First, there's never a guarantee that the committer tested it, especially if they had to pull before committing (less likely they tested the resulting merge than tested their original code). Second, rewriting history isn't a big loss. It's done all the time here on this list. The patches I've sent in rarely appear applied on top of the commit I made them from. The mob branch could just be viewed as a set of patches to use, and it becomes the maintainer's job to test the results after cherry-picking from them.

~~ Brian