Re: Branches are Scary

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Ingo Lohmar <i.lohmar@gmail.com> writes:
>> I always find deleting branches (that I have created) rather an unhappy
>> experience, as I worry that I will do the wrong thing, and accidentally
>> delete emacs-25.
>
> If you only delete local branches, that should not happen without your
> explicit consent (unless you are using a fairly malicious interface on
> top of plain git).

I'm using magit. I don't know what will happen if I try, and obvious, I
don't want to try.


>> At the same time, if I am understanding things correctly, I can't squash
>> and force feature and fix branches that I have pushed up, which means
>> that these have to get deleted unmerged cause I squash and merge locally.
>
> It seems that *this* is the actual problem to solve.  The rule of thumb
> is simple: Do not squash or rebase any commits you have pushed out, it
> makes life hard for everybody else, that's why it's not allowed in the
> repository.  If you still plan substantial cleanup of your commits, just
> do not push them yet.

Makes it hard to get comments on them, I think. I had substantial
comments on one branch (couldn't have completed it without them) as well
as an effective code review before I merged. Possibly, the solution is
not to use the main emacs git for this form of collaboration, but to
publish my own repo, but this seems an obvious use to me.

Clearly rebasing on a branch with many people are working on would be
bad.

> I am also unsure whether force-deleting branches in the emacs repo is
> permitted, but it does not matter: Please do not try to work around the
> restrictions by deleting branches.

I'm not. Just trying to clean up after myself.

>
>>
>> Perhaps I am worried about this unnecessarily. Can I delete emacs-25 or
>> master by mistake? And, at the same time, is it possible to squash
>> things in other branches?
>>
>> Phil
>
> The concept of squashing is fairly unrelated to the concept of branches.
> The rules are the same for all commits, wherever they are.

Then I have learned something. Probably I can delete emacs-25 if I want.
Ah, well, I will just have to be careful.

Phil