Re: master has switched from Automake to GNU Make

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at> writes:

>>> It's distracting for people like me who don't understand git.  Today it
>>> confused me enough that I messed up the ChangeLog of my commit and did
>>> not notice it before pushing.
>>
>> Hmmm... I can't see how that could happen if you don't actually use that
>> branch, so I guess you've merged from that branch and tried to re-merge?
>
> No.  I started to read about forced updates and didn't check the
> status of my commit thoroughly.
>
>> It's not essential, but some people like to keep branches as a clean set
>> of patches on top of master, so they regularly rebase (and reorganize
>> the set of patches), so in the end it doesn't give you the path that was
>> followed to get there (which, while historically accurate, tends to be
>> messy and hard to follow) but only "a nice path to get there", which is
>> basically a single patch divided into a few commented logical steps.
>
> Isn't one of the primary purposes of a branch (besides of sharing) to
> record the historically accurate picture of how its authors arrived at
> the present state?  If not I really am an idiot wrt version controlling.

It depends.

The "monotone" version control system absolutely forbids tampering with
past history; the history increments "monotonically".

But git is more flexible; it allows editing history.

One reason to edit history is because you used the tool wrong (happens a
lot :).

Another reason is the scenario Stefan mentioned; you are messing around
in a branch, finally get it right, and rewrite history to pretend you
knew where you would end up all along.

It might make sense to keep the messy branch for history, and create a
new branch that has the clean sequence of commits. But we officially
only care about history on the main branch.

-- 
-- Stephe