Are you serious? I was being polite and posted a question asking for some constructive feedback. I got some of this, then Mithaldu went off the deep-end and decided to start ridiculing me and tell me how he'd avoid the company I work at because of the questions I'm asking. And now you're saying that I'm the one crossing a line here? Seriously? I just re-read the guidelines, which did I break? The only one I can imagine is not flagging the comment but that was because the software did not let me since it was a reply to one of my posts.
I have been perfectly civil. Telling someone they are not being constructive and should grow up is not uncivil when it's in response to:
> Please tell me what company you work at so i can avoid it. There's no other way to say it other than that your ideas horrify me.
Be sure to read that again and let it sink in. This person wants to know what company I work at so he can avoid it because of a question I asked on the internet about git.
Further, while i think HN is inconsistent at best in how it applies its rules², i realize that dang does have a point and i could've dug further with questions, to see if your mind could be changed. However, the same applies to you just as much. Instead of accusing me of being a child³, you could just as well have asked why i recoiled in horror and thus rerail the discussion in a constructive direction, like to3m did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745547
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² The rules are hilariously strict, which can be a good thing, but applied to only a small percentage of rule-breaking posts.
Sorry, but when you react like the way you did I simply lose any interest in discussing the matter with you any further. Frankly it also makes you lose credibility in my book; if you cannot manage to have a polite conversation where you disagree with someone then it paints a picture of someone who yells and walks away whenever someone disagrees with them. A person like that may believe they are right, but if they can't properly discuss things, how would they know? So why should I trust them? Not saying that this interpretation is accurate or anything, that's just how your posts came off and why I wasn't interested in further discussing the matter with you and reacted the way I did.
But very well, as long as we can keep things polite:
There exists a possibility you misinterpreted my intent. I am talking about the following scenario:
* Feature branch is written by a developer, has been tested (not as much as they'd like, because deadlines) and it is merged into master
* Master branch is made publicly available, CI builds from it, and builds wind up in production
* Some time passes, eventually a critical bug is uncovered in the code from the feature branch. This is bad and should have been caught earlier, but it didn't, and shit happens.
* Work starts on a fix as soon as the developer resources are available. In the meantime the code from that feature branch should be "disabled" so the product remains functional in the meantime.
So what has worked well for us is reverting the merge commit(s) where the feature branch is merged into master. This commit is given a descriptive commit message and we actually appreciate there being a mark in the revision history about this.
We have dozens of these projects for different customers, and less than a dozen developers. Rewriting the history of the master branch would result in chaos as every developer gets to merge their own feature branch into master.
Are you still recoiling in horror? If so, feel free to elaborate as to why and how you would do this better.
Sadly i don't have mounds of time right now to write bigger answers, but i first need to figure out what your knowledge is, because we're not quite on the same page yet.
> every developer gets to merge their own feature branch into master.
Are you sure you wanted to say merge? If the master branch is rewritten into a new branch, feature branches on it would need to be rebased normally.
Is there a reason that you're saying "every developer gets to"? Normally they'd only need to rebase when they wish to integrate it back into master anyhow, which is likely to be conflict-free if they didn't rely on the feature, and also likely to be conflict-free if they wait until you've re-added the feature in a fixed state. And if they decide to rebase before you re-add it, then they'd have to deal with those conflicts exactly the same as if they'd merge before your revert-revert.
Do your developers do the SVN thing of continually merging master into their feature branch? Typically that is a bad habit which should be replaced with rebases of the feature branch.
Why do you care if history gets rewritten? Because you fear it would create more work, or because you consider history inviolable.
> we actually appreciate there being a mark in the revision history about this.
I think tags with descriptions would serve the same purpose. Do you see issues with that?
> Are you sure you wanted to say merge? If the master branch is rewritten into a new branch, feature branches on it would need to be rebased normally.
Yes. The way we currently do things is keeping things as simple as possible for everyone, even if this doesn't produce the prettiest history. A developer first creates their feature branch based off of master, commits several times to this feature branch, tests it and possibly asks for review from a coworker and then they merge this feature branch into master using --no-ff, always creating a merge commit.
It's possible there have been commits to master since they based off of it. If so, they will resolve this in the merge. I do think it would be better if feature branches got rebased prior to merging onto master so they can be tested in this state as well but this is currently not how things are done (it is not up to me). Though that could create issues if there's multiple developers collaborating on a feature branch and they do not communicate properly.
The reason I said "every developer gets to" is that in larger projects (which also usually use gerrit, which do not) I've seen that there are usually a select few people in charge of merging the feature branches into master, instead of everyone getting to merge as they see fit.
My view on rewriting history is that it should not happen on shared branches as this will surely lead to issues where one of the developers does not do the entire 'fetch rebase merge' dance correctly, or works directly on master. We also contract some work out to external agencies and their git usage is usually absymal, and I am not in the position to correct or influence any of that.
> I think tags with descriptions would serve the same purpose. Do you see issues with that?
I'm not sure how the tags with descriptions would help with easily rolling back all the changes introduced through a feature branch, but maybe I'm missing something.
Merging feature branches off of one branch that was rewritten into a new one into the new one is nothing anybody would ever do or recommend. Rebasing is a requirement here, and truthfully an operation with less mental overhead, since it's actually just "copy all of those commits over to here, then put the branch marker at the end of the new copy".
It kind of sounds to me as if you're saying "i don't want my developers to not learn rebase because it's easier if they learn a little less". Is that a correct understanding? If so, then you're trading a little upfront work for a lot of cleanup work later on.
> My view on rewriting history is that it should not happen on shared branches
Depends on how shared they are and how big the fuck-up is. Everything is relative.
> as this will surely lead to issues where one of the developers does not do the entire 'fetch rebase merge' dance correctly
There should not be any merge involved there. See first paragraph.
> or works directly on master.
That developer gets a notice to get his shit together and gets fired if he persists. This is teamwork, not cowboy work.
> I'm not sure how the tags with descriptions would help with easily rolling back
They don't. They help with marking places where old broken branches were abandoned and marking places where their new counterparts were reinstated.
Lastly:
> it is not up to me
If it's not up to you, and they'd not be willing to listen then the conversation is moot and your org is broken. You can't wedge one small part of a rebase-based workflow into a larger workflow that pretends git is just SVN with a different syntax.
I can tell you how to do everything correctly and how it will actually make things nice and smooth, but if everything is not an option, then a little can't be applied to your situation.
> Merging feature branches off of one branch that was rewritten into a new one into the new one is nothing anybody would ever do or recommend. Rebasing is a requirement here, and truthfully an operation with less mental overhead, since it's actually just "copy all of those commits over to here, then put the branch marker at the end of the new copy".
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. In general we don't rewrite history of shared branches thus rebasing is certainly not a requirement.
> It kind of sounds to me as if you're saying "i don't want my developers to not learn rebase because it's easier if they learn a little less". Is that a correct understanding? If so, then you're trading a little upfront work for a lot of cleanup work later on.
They're not my developers. I'm one of the developers. I'm trying to educate my coworkers more in the ways of the git, but it's slow progress. There has been no cleanup work so far, mostly because we're not obsessive over having a "clean history", and are instead more than happy with a realistic one.
> Depends on how shared they are and how big the fuck-up is. Everything is relative.
It's not a fuck-up. Bugs happen, noticing and fixing them is progress. The revert commit references the issue tracker, and this itself is valuable history. Instead of the commits simply disappearing for a time.
> That developer gets a notice to get his shit together and gets fired if he persists. This is teamwork, not cowboy work.
Git is there to faciliate teamwork, not to get in the way.
Just to remind you of what the context of this discussion is:
You commented on an article that says, paraphrased: "Stop merging criss and cross y'all, it's dumb and counterproductive; rebase everything instead, it'll help you in the long run."
In that context, you asked "well merge commits are easily to revert, if i can't merge, how to i revert a feature branch?"
I answered to that, in the context given by the article on which you were commenting. That context is: "Rebasing all your things is mandatory."
As i said in my previous post, if you're not willing to even mentally adopt that context, then nothing i can say would be helpful.
Are you interested in doing that?
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> we're not obsessive over having a "clean history", and are instead more than happy with a realistic one.
I deeply resent the implication. This kind of stance is what led me to my initial post you took offense to. What you perceive as obsession is experience and knowledge by people who have experienced both sides of the coin, along with their benefits and pains, and made a rational decision on which is more favourable in the long term.
You won't find me accusing you of obsession with fixed history just because you haven't had the (mis)fortune to make the full range of experiences on this.
> Instead of the commits simply disappearing for a time.
Nothing disappears, that is specifically why i mentioned tags. If one abandons a branch and the history is valuable to keep around, you stick a tag on the end of that branch, give it a description pointing at the ticket, then put a similar tag on the end of the remade branch, and off you go.
> not to get in the way.
How is git getting in the way of teamwork in your opinion?
> It's not a fuck-up.
Bugs are fuck-ups. There are no two ways around that. Especially when they're bad enough that a feature branch would be removed wholesale, and not simply disabled with a flag.
I have been perfectly civil. Telling someone they are not being constructive and should grow up is not uncivil when it's in response to:
> Please tell me what company you work at so i can avoid it. There's no other way to say it other than that your ideas horrify me.
Be sure to read that again and let it sink in. This person wants to know what company I work at so he can avoid it because of a question I asked on the internet about git.