Re: Bootstrapping into git, commit gripes at me

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 12, 2005, 04:59 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507112149290.17536@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050712044352.GA9919@buici.com>

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Marc Singer wrote:

> 
> Does it make sense to think about this branch as an flow of commits?
> Or is it just a starting point for a line of development?

It's really a flow of commits. Nothing will ever really remember what the starting point was at some later date if you have done commits, and the branch will always follow the _head_ of development on that branch.

So if you need to remember the starting point as a _static_ entity, you need to create a tag pointing to that place. You can do that at any point, very much including after you've already done development (but before you forget what to tag ;)

> If I make a branch, check it out, commit changes to it, and then clobber
> the working directory, can I later resume that branch of development
> without creating a new branch?

Absolutely. You can create a branch, commit to it, switch to another branch, commit to that one, switch back to the branch you created, and just go on. A branch will always follow the development.

> Do I need to set a tag to mark the last commit on that branch?

No, but as mentioned, _if_ you care about remembering where you _started_ the branch, you may want to tag that.

Of course, most of the time you really really don't care. It will be largely obvious from the global commit history, which you can trivially visualize with "gitk --all". You'll see where your branch "split off" the main branch, and the only case where that is ambiguous is if you started your branch at the tip of another branch, and no other development has gone on in that other branch - then you don't see a "fork".

Of course, the other reason you usually don't care where you started is that you simply don't care. When you use CVS, you usually need to know where the branch was started (and each point it was merged at) just so that you can sanely merge it by doing diffs etc. With git, since we have all the proper history, that's not necessary at all.

So I _suspect_ that most of the time when you create a branch, you don't need to tag where you started. Others will see what is your development simply by virtue of it being in your tree and not in other peoples tree, whether you created a branch for that or not ;)

		Linus