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by glormph 2801 days ago
TIL there are revert commits, which prompted me to actually read the article and not just the HN comments. Thank you!
1 comments

It's one of my favorite things in git! Don't "pretend the commit didn't happen", actually "undo" the commit (as in commit the reverse of your change).

Not only does it preserve the change in an easy-to-see manner, but you can also provide more context on why you undid your commit (my revert messages often read like "Revert "previous commit message here" due to it potentially causing some older android devices to break. More info at ticket #1234")

Now not only do you have a clear history of what happened (someone added X, then you undid X at a later date), but you also have context for why the change was undone, and can either revert the revert if you need to, or just re-do the work in a new commit later.

It's a great "oh shit" button that I'm much more willing to use since I know I won't have to worry about "rescuing" the commit later. If something goes wrong and I have a hunch it was caused in a commit, i'll often just revert it and investigate later when I have time.

That, and since you're preserving commit history, you can later re-enable that change by making a second revert commit of the first revert.