Oh shit, git (2016)

Every morning everyone mentions what they're working on (and so implicitly what their current branches are about). Most of the time there's no particular reason to pick their branch up, but sometimes there is. The only way that can work is if you never force-push the branches you're working on.

> Conversely if they haven't told you then you wouldn't just randomly pick a commit and start building on it?

Anything that's pushed to the repo is presumed good to pick up, that's what the repo is for. If it's not ready for others to pick up then why push it to the repo at all?

> AH so you're fundamentally against ever e.g. having a pull --rebase workflow on any branch you've ever pushed to any remote... regardless of who's working on what, what communication has occurred, whether that branch will even exist 2 hours from now, or whatever. Merge is the only valid approach in your mind, period. Honestly I have zero hope of trying to convince you merge isn't a size-fits-all dogma, so I won't try anymore except to point out that git supports both workflows for a reason, and its own documentation is clear that neither is strictly superior to the other: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing#_rebas....

Did you read your own link? The last paragraph says exactly what I've been saying.

You push... because you have 2+ repos you want to sync? Because you don't want to lose data if you mess things up locally? Because the remote repo runs tests on push that you want to run before you've finished the entire branch? Because someone else needs to be able to pick up your code if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? Because your boss or coworkers might need to be able to look at your code in an emergency? There are a million reasons to push that don't imply every commit on every pushed branch being suitable for splitting into another branch...

> Did you read your own link? The last paragraph says exactly what I've been saying.

It says that because they're (a) assuming if you've pushed code then you've probably published, which is a safer assumption but exactly what I've been arguing is not necessarily the case (and I've been trying to explain when it's not), and more generally (b) because they're erring on the side of caution. Which makes sense; I'd give the same advice to someone who's learning git. That's is exactly why the previous paragraph says "hopefully you’ll see that it’s not that simple" and "it’s up to you to decide which one is best for your particular situation". Those sentences aren't there for decoration. And it's why there is such a thing called a rebase workflow and why they made --force-with-lease and... again, I can't hope to convince you of the value of this workflow, just like how I can't convince you to use tabs over spaces (or tabs and spaces...). What I was doing was explaining how/when it can be useful while avoiding the problems you're hoping to avoid if you haven't already dogmatically rejected the rebase workflow from the start.

It sure doesn't feel like that.

Instead it feels rather like a lump of code I'm dealing with now. The needed to add feature X, so they did a brief look for the easiest place to bolt it on. In the code I'm dealing with now that meant y2k stuff was placed in with the tracing code, I presume because the trace headers were used everywhere y2k was needed so they didn't have to add new modules.

In Git case "git reset" has so many features only tangentially related it looks to me the person adding the feature must have followed the same "I need X, I don't want to add or even think about how the CLI is structured so I'll just sneak it in with CLI command Z which looks vaguely similar". And thus we end up with the a similar mess to the code I'm dealing with.

In Hg's case someone evidently put a lot of thought into the overall mental model the CLI would create, and came up with something rather neat. Sadly it doesn't always reflect how it operates underneath, so it can confuse people when things go wrong. When the abstraction created by the CLI breaks, you end up having to do what all people do abstractions leak and learn two things: both the abstraction and how it really works underneath. But Hg's CLI is so well designed casual users will never have to deal with it.

In git's case the CLI bears little relationship to anything. Because nothing is where you expect nor does quite what you think it should things go wrong really quickly. That forces users to learn and think in terms of the underlying data structure which creates a lot of pain up front, but in the end you are always better off understanding things in terms of how they work underneath.

The interesting thing is git is _so_ bad the official git doco has a really good section devoted to describing what is happening underneath, which makes learning it fairly straight forward. Hg doco doesn't do that. While there are some descriptions of how it works underneath it's interwoven in with the description of the CLI, so you can't just read one smallish section and get the big picture. Worse, you can never be sure whether they are describing the model presented by CLI, or what actually happens to be bits and bytes. This makes the jump to real understanding how Hg works harder than git. It's weird how things turn out. I guess which is better depends on the situation.

In any case, please don't dignify git's CLI by claiming it conforms to someone's mental model. To paraphrase Linus, if it does, that someone must have been a demented ferret.