Re: [PATCH 3/3] Allow whole-tree operations to be started from a subdirectory

[Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>]

Steven Grimm wrote:
> Here's one use case for merge/pull/rebase that is, if not an everyday 
> thing, then at least fairly common in my group: Person B fixes a bug 
> in some code that's causing problems for the code person A is working 
> on. Person A is not at a stopping point in his own work yet, but wants 
> to get the fix.

I'll add that that's also the use case where I want git-pull and 
git-rebase to merge changes into my uncommitted working copy. It's 
probably less common in big distributed open-source projects where 
everyone is working on a logically separate, non-overlapping change to 
an otherwise stable code base, but in highly collaborative workgroup 
settings where 5 people are working on the same brand-new feature, it's 
not at all rare, and in those cases, where people are typically editing 
the same small set of files, you really do want to update early and 
often so as to minimize the scope of your merge conflicts and catch any 
integration problems as early as possible.

In that setting, I'd rather not have to commit before each update since 
I'd end up with a change history like "update" "update" "update" 
"implement function foo()" "update" "update" "fix a bug in bar()" etc., 
even if I use rebase.

Cogito handles this case reasonably well, though it has to play tricks 
to do it.

-Steve