Re: mtimes of working files

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 16:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Why would anybody force you to do that?
> 
> The "switch between branchs in the same repo" is really convenient.
> But nobody *forces* you to do it. 

This is true. I already mirror a bunch of CVS and SVN repositories into
git so that I can use them without too much pain¹, and I can do the same
for git trees which use branches too; mirroring them into a bunch of
separate trees for easy access.

On the occasions I actually try to _use_ branches, I find it very
suboptimal. Perhaps it's just because I'm stupid. I'm sure that's why I
ended up committing changes to the wrong branch. But having to rebuild
(even with ccache) after changing branches is a PITA. Just changing
branches at all is a PITA if you have uncommitted changes (which I
usually do because I've usually tested _some_ random patch in a build
tree for the hardware which is closest to hand). Pulling a whole bunch
of unwanted changes on the 'development' branch while on GPRS, when all
I really needed was a single commit from the 'stable' branch also didn't
amuse me, although I'm sure if I had the time to play with it I'd have
been able to avoid that.

I can, and do, mirror stuff from all kinds of suboptimal version control
systems into single-branch git trees. And I include multi-branched git
trees in my definition of 'suboptimal'. My ability to do that doesn't
really help the newbies who are expected with branches, though.

I just wish people would make stuff available on the _servers_ in
separate trees rather than in branches -- if some people prefer branches
locally then that's their option; at the moment we kind of force people
into it. They _could_ avoid it but they'd have to know what they're
doing.

But I didn't really mean to start an argument; it's just my opinion.

-- 
dwmw2

¹ and I'd do the same for Hg if I could get hg2git to work.