[Python-Dev] Hg: inter-branch workflow

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Mon Mar 21 21:24:38 CET 2011


On Mar 22, 2011, at 06:57 AM, Ben Finney wrote:

>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.

Thanks Ben, for such a clear description.  This jives with my observations
exactly.

Cheers,
-Barry

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