[tentonova]

This still feels like the sort of statement that comes from having not worked with a (D)VCS that does branching well.

I've worked with both git and hg.

There is no "inherent organizational complexity" in me having a private branch that I share with no one and which is only used for an hour or two while I work on a critical bug fix.

What's the value of this private branch beyond simply committing to the actual branch?

If it's just a bug fix, how big can it be?

If it's more than a bug fix, why am I hiding this code from the team by implementing it on a private, local, non-backed up, non-code-reviewed, non-centralized branch?

Typical branch lifetimes are more like hours or days, rather than weeks or months. There are exceptions, but by-and-large, branches are just used differently in git.

Why wouldn't I just commit this work incrementally to the actual upstream branch, rather than hiding it for "hours or days" from the rest of the team?

[kscaldef]

Reading this comment and your other comments in this discussion, I think you have some issues which have nothing to do with what version control system is being used. While you keep talking about "hiding code" and "hindering communication" and "cowboy coding", I think about keeping the history of our codebase well-organized so that you can understand the evolution of a single feature, so that commits are logically ordered, so that unrelated changes don't get lumped together because it was the easy thing to do.

To quickly comment on a couple of your other concerns, my local hard-drive is backed up, so that's irrelevant; and I personally feel that code review at the level of individual commits has very little value, and you should instead be reviewing complete feature implementations.