[Python-Dev] Hg: inter-branch workflow

[Ben Finney]

Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> writes:

> There's something I don't understand about rebase. It seems like most
> git and hg users I hear from advocate rebase, while (ISTM) few Bazaar
> users do.
>
> I'd like to understand whether that's a cultural thing or whether it's
> a byproduct of some aspect of the respective tools.

As I understand it, the justification usually given for rewriting
history is so that others get a clean view of what one has done.

As a user of Bazaar primarily, that's addressing the problem in the
wrong place: why rewrite *my* history, which is useful to me as is, when
the other person is using Bazaar and so doesn't see revisions they don't
care about?

The advantages given for rewriting history (“don't show individual
commits that went into a merge”) are null for a Bazaar user. Bazaar
doesn't show me those commits within merges anyway, unless I ask for
them.

That is, when showing the log of a branch, each merge appears as a
single entry, unless I ask to expand levels when viewing them. The
detailed revision data is always there, but it doesn't get in the way
unless I ask for it.

That seems to me the ideal: preserve all revision history for those
cases when some user will care about it, but *present* history cleanly
by default.

Whether adding support in Mercurial or Git for similar
clean-presentation-by-default would obviate the need for rewriting
history, I can't tell.

-- 
 \      “The best mind-altering drug is truth.” —Jane Wagner, via Lily |
  `\                                                            Tomlin |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney
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