[Python-Dev] Hg: inter-branch workflow (original) (raw)

Ben Finney ben+python at benfinney.id.au
Mon Mar 21 20:57:58 CET 2011

Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> writes:

There's something I don't understand about rebase. It seems like most git and hg users I hear from advocate rebase, while (ISTM) few Bazaar users do.

I'd like to understand whether that's a cultural thing or whether it's a byproduct of some aspect of the respective tools.

As I understand it, the justification usually given for rewriting history is so that others get a clean view of what one has done.

As a user of Bazaar primarily, that's addressing the problem in the wrong place: why rewrite my history, which is useful to me as is, when the other person is using Bazaar and so doesn't see revisions they don't care about?

The advantages given for rewriting history (“don't show individual commits that went into a merge”) are null for a Bazaar user. Bazaar doesn't show me those commits within merges anyway, unless I ask for them.

That is, when showing the log of a branch, each merge appears as a single entry, unless I ask to expand levels when viewing them. The detailed revision data is always there, but it doesn't get in the way unless I ask for it.

That seems to me the ideal: preserve all revision history for those cases when some user will care about it, but present history cleanly by default.

Whether adding support in Mercurial or Git for similar clean-presentation-by-default would obviate the need for rewriting history, I can't tell.

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