I think the lesson here is that for all our high-minded self-esteem, Hacker News is just as susceptible to hive-mind behavior as the sites HN users like to pooh-pooh.
Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#22Instant overreaction and posting to HN has come up a lot lately. The Skype story yesterday was another mistake where a technical support person wrote that a bug was "by design" when they meant to type "bug," so of course it gets raced into HN as 'news' rather than trying to get clarification.
To be fair when working as a software tester on more than one occasion did a developer mark an obvious bug as "by design".
Sometimes it is by design, but the design is flawed.
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#23Takes something to apologize like that. I'm sure they're glad about it.
You seriously made me paranoid about my repositories.
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#24Wouldn't it be great if your scm actually kept all your changes no matter what?
So it appears that every response to my message said that it wasn't lost but would be in 90 days if no one noticed. That is not the definition of 'never loses changes'. The fact of the matter is that someone that doesn't understand the way git works can cause irreversible damage without recourse if not discovered. In many source control systems this is not the case. I still use git on github even with this flaw.
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#25Wouldn't it be great if your scm actually kept all your changes no matter what?
So it appears that every response to my message said that it wasn't lost but would be in 90 days if no one noticed. That is not the definition of 'never loses changes'. The fact of the matter is that someone that doesn't understand the way git works can cause irreversible damage without recourse if not discovered. In many source control systems this is not the case. I still use git on github even with this flaw.
You can configure git-receive-pack to not allow ref deletes (receive.denyDeletes) or any ref updates which aren't fast-forwards (receive.denyNonFastForwards), which makes this kind of data loss impossible. With Gitolite you can even set this permission per-user per-branch (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite#_main_features) so that the great power is only given to those with the great responsibility to handle it.
Of course, somebody still has to know and care enough to want to tweak the default configuration, and it doesn't help with GitHub for the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if they added finer-grained branch permissions in future.
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I understand, git actually always keeps your changes. It is just the pointers that can be overridden if you force an update. For instance, git reflog show origin/master shows even remote forced-updates. So although it looked like the commit was lost, it was still there, just not immediately visible, and was fully recoverable.
Yeah, exactly. We (GitHub) use reflogs on the server, so everything that was pushed was in the repository and can't be gc'd out for at least 90 days. The master branch ref was just pointing at the wrong commit due to the forced pushes.
Reflogs are a lifesaving Git feature, but I imagine a large proportion of "casual" Git users don't know they exist, not least because a lot of people's Git education comes from poking around the GitHub interface.
It'd be amazing if GitHub began exposing reflogs through the web somehow.
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#27Very classy apology. While Andrew's quickly jumping to conclusions is certainly not something to emulate (as he obviously implies in his apology), his ability to assume complete responsibility for a mistake that damaged a reputation is something all members of Internet communities should take note of.
Similarly, GitHub acted in a classy way too. Tom helped Andrew throughout the thread without any snark or dismissals that are, sadly, quite easy to dish out. It certainly contrasts with the recent "go away" Tumblr story.
Hadn't heard of this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151768
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#28Shame on those who upvoted the original linkbait story. When will these sorts of sensational headlines stop?
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#29Wouldn't it be great if your scm actually kept all your changes no matter what?
So it appears that every response to my message said that it wasn't lost but would be in 90 days if no one noticed. That is not the definition of 'never loses changes'. The fact of the matter is that someone that doesn't understand the way git works can cause irreversible damage without recourse if not discovered. In many source control systems this is not the case. I still use git on github even with this flaw.
I think, though, that for "never loses changes" to be meaningful it has to be shorthand for "never loses changes unless you do unsafe things". I mean, it certainly loses changes if you don't push to anywhere and then delete your .git directory.
The -f should mean "don't do this, it will probably wreck your shit". Unfortunately certain tools seem to require it way too often so it seems to be going the way of the venerable confirm dialog.
"Deleted all my files? I dunno, some funny box popped up and I hit OK. Was that it?"
Re: Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
#30As a side remark, I'd love it if github had an option to disable forced pushes for a project. In general they are very confusing in collaborations.