Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mbrock 3183 days ago
I'm not sold on the idea of the master log as a readable narrative.

If you really want to maintain such a narrative, it would be possible to do it separately, in something like a changelog.

You might even hire someone to do that, a kind of technical historian. It's real work, because software development is pretty messy.

If you reaaally care about the history of the software's development, I would seriously consider aggressive rebasing of the repository even much later -- you could refactor the commit history as much as you want to clarify the logical progression of the software.

As I see it, a source code repository is not like a history book, because a history book is written after the fact by a trained historian who spends a lot of energy on tidying up the narrative and making it actually comprehensible.

A source code repository looks to me more like an archaelogical artifact with some terse notes sprinkled in there as clues by the various workers.

Basically I think the git log structure is kind of overblown and workflow arguments that hinge on the legibility of the repository's graph structure don't really matter that much to me.

I still sometimes write pretty involved commit messages, but that's a kind of separate issue from these "workflow" discussions that are mostly about how you should formally arrange the DAG. And I also know that my commit messages are mostly lost in time like tears in rain, so I try to communicate important changes in other ways.