Re: Question about your git habits

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 11:10:48PM -0500, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> I find that the sequence of changes I make is pretty much unrelated to the 
> sequence of changes that end up in the project's history, because my 
> changes as I make them involve writing a lot of stubs (so I can build) and 
> then filling them out. It's beneficial to have version control on this so 
> that, if I screw up filling out a stub, I can get back to where I was.
> 
> Having made a complete series, I then generate a new series of commits, 
> each of which does one thing, without any bugs that I've resolved, such 
> that the net result is the end of the messy history, except with any 
> debugging or useless stuff skipped. It's this series that gets merged into 
> the project history, and I discard the other history.
> 
> The real trick is that the early patches in a lot of series often refactor 
> existing code in ways that are generally good and necessary for your 
> eventual outcome, but which you'd never think of until you've written more 
> of the series. Generating a new commit sequence is necessary to end up 
> with a history where it looks from the start like you know where you're 
> going and have everything done that needs to be done when you get to the 
> point of needing it. Furthermore, you want to be able to test these 
> commits in isolation, without the distraction of the changes that actually 
> prompted them, which means that you want to have your working tree is a 
> state that you never actually had it in as you were developing the end 
> result.
> 
> This means that you'll usually want to rewrite commits for any series that 
> isn't a single obvious patch, so it's not a big deal to commit any time 
> you want to work on some different branch.

I do that so much that I have this alias:
        reorder = !sh -c 'git rebase -i --onto $0 $0 $1'

... and actually pass it only one argument most of the time.

Mike