[vintagedave]

>> a data scientist accidentally destroyed a month’s work of his team

> This is mostly a configuration issue

git apologism :)

(FWIW I do agree with the rest of your comment, and I hope you forgive the slight joke. Product users, for any product are fallible humans. That might be fallible in accidentally deleting, or it might be fallible in forgetting to turn on the safety settings.)

Very seriously, something like this should not be possible in a source control system. Data integrity needs to be built in by design.

[MatthiasPortzel]

> Data integrity needs to be built in by design

It is built into Git by design. Git keeps commits around for 90 days even after they’re “deleted.” This is why people who understand Git were so skeptical of OP’s claim. The point that Git is confusing still stands, however.

[devjab]

The issue with a lot of freedom and unopinionated tools is always going to be the multitude of ways to fuck up. On the flip-side, you may not like what choices are made if you’re forced to use it in a certain way.

We enforce a strict pull-request squish commit with four eyes approval only. You can’t force push, you can’t rebase, you can’t not squish or whatever else you’d want to do. But we don’t pretend that is the “correct” way to use Git, we think it is, but who are we to tell you how to do you?

We take a similar approach to how we use Typescript. We have our own library of coding “grammar?” that you have to follow if you want to commit TS into our pipelines. Again, we have a certain way to do things and you have to follow them, but these ways might not work for anyone else, and we do sometimes alter them a little if there is a good reason to do so.

I don’t personally mind strict and opinionated software. I too think Git has far too many ways to fuck up, and that is far too easy to create a terrible work environment with JavaScript. It also takes a lot of initial effort to set rules up to make sure everyone works the same way. But again, what if the greater community decided that rebase was better than squash commit? Then we wouldn’t like Git, and I’m sure the rebase crowd feels the same way. The result would likely leave us with two Gits.

Though I guess with initiatives like the launch here, is two Gits. So… well.

[oblio]

> But again, what if the greater community decided that rebase was better than squash commit? Then we wouldn’t like Git, and I’m sure the rebase crowd feels the same way. The result would likely leave us with two Gits.

Meh, this is overrated. We'd end up with 2 Gits, and over time just one fork would probably take over, based on marketing, PR, dev team activity, etc. The second one would probably still be around but used by only a minor part of the community.

Just because a thing has on paper many forks, does not mean those forks are equal. In fact, a situation with many major forks rarely survives the long term. See Jenkins vs Hudson, Firefox vs Iceweasel, etc. Most people will congregate towards one of the forks and that's it.

[dmazzoni]

What if someone pushes something inappropriate? Shouldn't there be a way to delete it?

As an example, what if someone pushes:

- A private key or password - Copyrighted content - Illegal content

In cases like this, it needs to be possible to remove the bad commit from the repository entirely.

[layer8]

Yes, but this should be only possible by way of commands that make it abundantly clear what you are doing, e.g. `git delete <whatever>` with extra confirmation “Do you really want to permanently and irrevocably delete <whatever> in the master repository?”, or a more obvious “recycle bin” that presents deleted branches/commits in familiar ways and with explicit expiration dates. But the Git architecture doesn’t lend itself to that level of user-friendlyness.