Labelled branches: why mercurial is better than git

tl;dr: Person finds a legitimate difference between Git and Hg and doesn't seem to understand that different people could have different but equally legitimate opinions on the situation.

"The saddening thing is that so many Git users seem to have a conceptual block against even recognizing there is a problem here. They embrace the need for historical revisionism that their tools force on them, and they call it a virtue."

Because they have a different opinion. Stunner.

I found the article itself very persuasive, your comment much less so.

It doesn't seem like the feature would be hard to add to git, and wouldn't affect anybody who doesn't use it or turns it off in their preferences.

It would never be used in the Linux kernel environment, but it does seem like something very useful in a standard corporate environment with their common shared central code repositories.

I'm one of those people that don't see a problem. I don't care what branch work happened on. I care whether it was merged or not. If I'm missing something, could someone correct me? My responses would be as follows:

> A) I need to know which branch ab3e2afd was committed to know whether to include it in the change control review for the upcoming release;

Why? Is there more to it than you need to know whether it is going in this release, and whether it went in the last release?

> B) I need to know which change is the first change in the release branch because I'd like to start a new topic branch with that as my starting point so that I'll be as current as possible and still know that I can do a clean merge into master and release later;

You need the earliest on the release branch that has not also been on the master branch.

> C)I need to know where topic branch started so that I can gather all the patches up together and send them to a colleague for review.

You need to send them all the commits on the topic branch that aren't merged elsewhere.

git has nice syntax for specifying ranges of commits of these forms.

Here are a few examples of where it's nice to have that extra information:

- "Show me all commits by Jimmy, but don't bother with those he made on the i18n branch."

- "Did Sally make this change on the 3.1 branch and then backport it to 3.0, or did she start on 3.0 and then merge forward into 3.1?"

- "Show me all the changesets Steve has made on the 'stable' branch, so I can make sure he's only putting bugfixes there and not sneaking in new features."

It's inaccurate to label your opinion as tl;dr.