Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 25, 2007, 10:17 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0710251112390.25221@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <47204297.5050109@op5.se>

Hi,

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, Steffen Prohaska wrote:
> > 
> > > On Oct 25, 2007, at 12:14 AM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > > 
> > > > But I think I have to drive my message home again: if what you 
> > > > desire becomes reality, you take away the clear distinction 
> > > > between local and remote branches.  In fact, those branches are 
> > > > neither local (because the next pull will automatically update 
> > > > them with remote changes, but _only_ if they fast-forward) nor 
> > > > remote (because you plan to work on them locally).
> > >
> > > Exactly, because I do not work on those branches alone. These are 
> > > _shared_ branches. I can work on such a branch with a group of 
> > > developers. I'm willing to accept this bit of chaos.
> > 
> > It is not just a chaos.  I see a serious problem here.  On _your_ 
> > computer, you do _not_ have a shared branch.  Which is visible _even_ 
> > in your modified work flow when you have unpushed changes.
> 
> Ofcourse it is. People might pull from it. That's the whole point of a 
> distributed model.

By that reasoning, left is right.  Because your "left" is my "right".

Show 10 quoted lines

> > So your desired illusion that your local branches are anything but 
> > local branches will never be perfect enough.
> > 
> > > Your rebase workflow is not possible if more than one dev wants to 
> > > work on the topic branch together.
> > 
> > Why not?  I do it all the time.  CVS users do it all the time, for 
> > that matter.
> 
> For 200 branches at a time, where any of them might have changed?

I slowly start to understand why your users are confused. _Nobody_ works on 200 branches at the same time. (No, maintainers don't count: they do not work _on_ the branches, but _with_; they merge them.)

When you're done with a topic, why do you leave it around? Cluttering up your "git branch" output?

Show 7 quoted lines

> > The problem I see here: you know git quite well.  Others don't, and 
> > will be mightily confused why pull updates local branches sometimes, 
> > and sometimes not.
> 
> Do you know this, or are you just guessing? I'm getting the exact same
> confusion with the current behaviour. "Why the hell doesn't git update
> all the branches I told the damn stupid tool to auto-merge when I pull?"

That's easy. A merge can have conflicts. Conflicts need a working directory. You cannot have multiple working directories. (Actually, you can, with git-new-workdir, which would break down _horribly_ with your desired change.)

Oh? You don't have local changes? Then why _on earth_ do you have a local branch?

Ciao, Dscho