Re: VC mode and git

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > > Bazaar allowed a workflow that Git doesn't, that's why you could
 > > maintain the illusion of a single operation in a bound branch.
 > 
 > This seems to be a serious flaw in Git.

Hardly.  Use of bound branches has always been a minority taste.  As
somebody else commented, I'm surprised you of all people could stand
them, because you need to learn a non-default operation (commit
--local) to work disconnected.  Did you use "bzr commit --local", or
did you just not commit, if you're not connected to Savannah?

I'm not even sure what the semantics of bzr commit are in a bound
branch containing local commits (push all pending? but that's going to
be messy if the push fails).

 > If our recommendations for how to work on Emacs using Git include
 > the necessary customization, that could be sufficient to solve the
 > practical problem.

You have a practical problem: git behavior is not compatible with the
semantics you assign to "commit".  I don't see evidence that Emacs has
a practical problem, as a very large number of contributors have
successfully converted to the documented git workflow for Emacs.  A
few do complain, but most are just git-haters from the get-go, and the
problems reported on this list seem to be one-off, not created by the
recommended workflow.

 > Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> proposed 
 > 
 >     git push || git reset HEAD^
 > 
 > Does that work reliably?

Not in the sense you mean.  It has deterministic semantics, but it
takes you to the state immediately after the penultimate commit, not
the state immediately before the ultimate commit.  These can differ,
for example if you've git add'ed, git rm'ed, or git mv'ed files in
between.  There may be other issues that would bother people looking
for an atomic commit-and-push operation.