Re: What are branches?

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 25, 2009, 11:11 UTC
Message-ID: <94a0d4530904250411k7cb074baidcc5c7d9710115ec@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0904191709220.10279@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> if you're like me, you used Git for _way_ too long to really understand
> how anybody can say that Git is hard to learn.  The concepts underlying
> Git have sunk so deep that I do not question them anymore.
>
> But it is important to keep in mind that our concept of branches is not
> intuitive:
>
> http://longair.net/blog/2009/04/16/git-fetch-and-merge/
>
> In particular, we have some pretty confusing nomenclature when it comes to
> branches, and we might want to think how to improve the situation.
>
> Food for thought on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Completely agree. The problem is that git doesn't really have branches.

In my mind a true branch has a divergence start-point from another branch, so if you rebase a branch, it must be from the start-point.

What git has been referring to "branches" are actually mere references. That's why 'git rebase' needs either a start-point specified manually, or it will need to travel the acyclic graph finding commits that are not already in the graph of the new start-point.

AFAIK TopGit makes true branches possible in git.

-- 
Felipe Contreras