Re: newbie questions about git design and features (some wrt hg)

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 2, 2007, 20:21 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702021214260.15057@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070202195504.GC7963@ventoux.cs.ubc.ca>

On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Brendan Cully wrote:

> 
> The public tags on the public history get pushed. This still sounds to
> me like the right thing.

And what happens if you have two public tags?

Ok, now you have answered the "how is this tying them together" question yourself.

Notice? You tied them together, by tying them to something else.

And that is what I say is WRONG. Tags are independent, because different people have different needs for them.

Yes, you can say that the tags that the "main developer" does are "magic", and should always follow the history. But EVEN THAT is wrong. Because it makes a supposition that should not be one. You shouldn't start out with the assumption that there is one centralized place that makes the decisions. It may be how most open source projects work, but it's not what the tool should enforce. Especially when projects break/fork/whatever, the tool should _support_ that. It shouldn't say "ok, those people are special, what they do is special".

Show 5 quoted lines

> > So tags are *events*. But if you think they are events "within" the 
> > history of a tree, you're missing a big issue.
> 
> Your distinction between "history" and "events" is unclear to
> me. What's history if not a series of events?

A lot of events are *independent*.

You seem to think that there is a dependency between tags that simply isn't there! You think it's ok to push them all out, because they are all "related". THAT IS NOT TRUE.

> Mercurial supports local tags too. As far as I can tell, these
> unversioned tags are about equivalent to git tags. They could
> certainly be used for your bisection scenario.

Can you push out your local tags?

A tag isn't "globally local" or "globally global". *MY* local tags make sense on my machines. It's just that they don't make sense on the public tree. They're not "local to a repository". They are LOCAL TO MY NETWORK.

See? That's the kind of behaviour that git supports. You can publish one set of tags, and not publish another. They're not "different tags", and not publishing them in one place does NOT mean that you can't publish them somewhere else.

		Linus