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577 points Delgan | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.564s | source
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kccqzy ◴[] No.44346929[source]
Git notes are only cool if you frequently add text to a commit after the commit has happened and visible to others.

The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.

One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.

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Zambyte ◴[] No.44347657[source]
> The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made.

Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.

> One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.

Commit messages are better for this use case. When you got blame a file, it shows the latest changes for that file. If a commit reverts changes from another commit, the newer commit that reverts the older commit will show up in the blame.

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saghm ◴[] No.44347839[source]
> Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.

It can't happen before the commit on a feature branch, but it can happen before merging the commit back to the main development branch. Given that a rebase or merge commit is already frequently necessary to integrate changes from a feature branch after review is finished, I don't see why this type of info couldn't be added (or even required to exist) before merging.

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Pxtl ◴[] No.44347981[source]
The history-destroying problems of rebasing are a rant on their own.
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saghm ◴[] No.44351562[source]
I don't think I agree with this take, at least not completely. I tend to commit quite frequently when working on a feature branch in ways that wouldn't be desirable to include in the history of the main development branch, and I take advantage of the fact that rebase lets me clean everything up beforehand into whatever commits I actually want afterwards (which I usually do two separate times, once before opening a review so I can ensure that the diffs help make things easier to read, e.g. if I need to include changes from another branch or make changes in the codebase that aren't directly related to what I'm working on but still are useful for my changes for some reason), and then again after the review is complete if I needed to make additional changes that don't belong in a separate commit (because I find that reviews are cleaner when rebases don't take place during them, and a review that requires more than one or two follow-up commits generally tends to be due to issues that need to be addressed with an offline discussion that I can come back afterwards with structural changes that make the existing diff less relevant). Having to preserve the exact history of commits during my development would be a bad thing in my opinion, since it would either require including lots of small unhelpful commits into the history of the main development branch or discourage committing as often, either of which I think would be a mistake.

Where I agree with your take partially is that the UX for all of this in git is not great, and that ends up meaning that most people don't actually use git in this way. If the process of manually structuring the commits to clean up history on a feature branch were more intuitive, then I'd predict the issues of history-destroying rebases to essentially be moot; everyone would just present the commits for review exactly as we'd want them before review, and then we'd fast-forward merge into the main development branch without any issue. The problem is that doing this sort of restructuring after the fact isn't actually easy to learn how to do because of the poor ergonomics of the git CLI, so it's both tedious and error-prone for almost everyone. My perspective is that most of the concern around messing with history in git comes from being burnt by changes that were not intended by the one making them, and that workflows that avoid it (like merge commits) are essentially a compromise to avoid that risk by accepting a certain amount of cruft in the history of the main development branch. I don't blame anyone for using them, since the problems that make the rebase workflow harder are very real, but I don't think that the fact that rebase changes history is the real issue as much as it provides a mechanism for the actual underlying issues to manifest.

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1. Pxtl ◴[] No.44355338[source]
My problem is that so many of git's features feel like they just aren't designed to accommodate history rewriting.

Like if I have branch X and branch Y, and X is 1 commit ahead of Y, but I alter the comment of a commit in Y, now X is one or more commits behind Y and will not recognize identical code-changes as identical.

It gets worse if you squash a commit, where you start getting conflicts during merges and rebases even though the code-changes are the same.

I understand why these problems happen, and the ways to prevent it (don't rebase anything pushed), but it still underscores the fact that git doesn't properly accommodate its own love of rewriting history.

If git had a proper synced graph of history-rewriting actions (commit A was rewritten into commit B) then it would be able to provide better responses when doing a merge or reflist across rewritten branches.

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2. saghm ◴[] No.44356635[source]
Yep, I don't disagree with you about that. To me, the cost of having to stick with a workflow that prevents it (which you describe) is still worth it to have a clean history without merge commits, but I totally understand that this is a matter of personal preference, and having a consistent workflow for everyone working on a project together matters more. Right now, I'm working on a team that uses merge commits for the first time in a while, and it's definitely taking a bit of time to get used to again, but I'm still committing to it (pun intended!)