Re: Git Vs. Svn for a project which *must* distribute binaries too.

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Olivier Galibert wrote:

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 01:45:26PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

I'd like to point out some more upsides and downsides of "git rebase".

Downsides:

 - you're rewriting history, so you MUST NOT have made your pre-rebase 
   changes available publicly anywhere else (or you are in a world of pain 
   with duplicate history and tons of confusion)

Wouldn't it be possible to register the rebase somewhere (weak parent?
some kind of note not influencing the sha1 ?) that pull/merge could
follow?  Rebases and cherry-picking are a special kind of merge, so
maybe it can be handled like one where it counts...

Well, it's not like duplicate history is a disaster from a *technical* 
angle. It might be a small space-waster etc, but that's really not the 
real issue.

The problem with duplicate history is that it just makes things much 
harder to look at. IOW, it's *messy*. So the "tons of confusion" part is 
basically purely about humans, not about git itself. Git won't really 
care, and there's no reason to "handle" it specially in that sense.

So I would strongly discourage people from ever making rebased history 
available, but that's not because of any particular git technical issues 
as just because of it being a good way to confuse all the _humans_ 
involved.

(That said, gits own 'pu' branch ends up jumping around, and it hasn't 
caused all that much confusion, so maybe I'm overstating even that human 
confusion)

			Linus