Re: An alternate model for preparing partial commits

From: Stephen Sinclair <radarsat1@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 28, 2008, 14:34 UTC
Message-ID: <9b3e2dc20806280734i6ca17cc8i447c2e2db67e8051@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <9af502e50806271708p7979ae65k61b71be90efff2c4@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Robert Anderson <rwa000@gmail.com> wrote:

> If I come back to a branch on which there are several
> commits which have not been pushed yet, how do I know which are
> "temporary" and which are "for real" commits?  I cannot.  It is
> impossible.  The information is not there.

I use the comments for this. I frequently have comments that say... "NOT FINISHED, AMEND this". I make sure they don't get into my public repo.

You could even automate it with a hook. You could program your public repo to refuse a push that contains commits with some keyword like "WIP", and get used to putting WIP into any new commit until you're sure about it. I think you can even program a hook (commit-msg?) to generate the initial comment for any commit, so you could make it the default.

> But, all of this is moot when you consider the simple case of a repo
> which has been cloned, on which you'd like to make partial commits,
> and test the committed state before doing so.

You can work in a branch which is not intended to be cloned, and only merge/rebase to master when you're ready. You can work in a separate repo and only push to public when you're ready. There are several solutions here for what you want to do.

The answer is simple: you should not be making partial commits to a repo that has been cloned. You should instead be working somewhere else and then pushing to it. So this whole sentence is just a moot point itself.

Steve