[progmetaldev]

Does this mean that NTFS filesystems are affected, even if using from a PowerShell or cmd.exe window, if you are aware? I use git bash or PowerShell daily, but have only used WSL directly for certain processes I am more familiar with in bash than on Windows shells. I've done quite a bit of text processing in WSL, where I just have more experience in the tooling on Linux/bash shell than in Windows, even though I often write dotnet software that runs on Windows, yet uses the open source dotnet and it could run on Linux with a few changes (like making sure I can access MS SQL Server on Azure from Linux, or run MS SQL Server for Linux - I haven't done this, and the CMS I currently use only supports SQLite for development, but require MS SQL Server for production). I might be able to get away with using SQLite for production by only allowing a single user to make edits at a time, and using heavy caching.

I came from a world of Mercurial, and I would love to be able to commit very often, and then be able to squash all those commits into a single commit. I feel git rebase does that, but I haven't been able to truly grok how to do that without running the possibility of completely destroying all changes I've made. I can't lose a giant feature (which is what I generally build) that may take an entire week to build, because I used the wrong git rebase command. I would love to be able to change an individual file and commit it to compare against new changes, but then pull all of these temporary changes/commits and merge/squash them all into a single commit, in case I need to rollback everything due to some breaking update.

[bulatb]

Rewriting a commit in Git (with rebase, --amend, --squash, whatever) creates a new commit with your changes, keeping the original around but detached from the branch. For example, amending the tip of a feature branch (git checkout feature; git commit --amend) turns this:

  A --- B --- C <- [main]
         \
          X --- Y --- Z <- [feature]

into this:

  A --- B --- C <- [main]
         \
          X --- Y --- Z' <- [feature]
                 \
                  Z

The old commit is not destroyed, just taken off the path you walk from "feature" back in time. Even if you `rebase -i main` on "feature" and drop Y and Z, they'll still be around, just not in your branch:

  A --- B --- C <- [main]
         \     \
          \     X' <- [feature]
           \
            X --- Y --- Z

If you're worried about rebase going bad, before you start, create a temporary branch (git checkout -b before-risky-rebase; git checkout -) to mark that line of history where "feature" points at the good state.

  A --- B --- C <- [main]
         \
          X --- Y --- Z <- [feature,before]

If anything goes wrong that `rebase --abort` doesn't fix, get out of there somehow and `git checkout before-risky-rebase`, or, on "feature," `git reset --hard before-risky-rebase`. Here, the backup branch "before" is still what "feature" was before the rebase:

  A --- B --- C <- [main]
         \     \
          \     X' --- (bad) --- (oops) <- [feature]
           \
            X --- Y --- Z <- [before]

As long as you don't force-push anything, it doesn't really matter if you damage the now-broken branch even more while getting out. Reset "feature" to your backup and it never happened. You can even damage "main" and still `reset --hard` to origin/main (if you have one) or the tip "main" had before you broke it.

Even if you don't remember to create the backup branch, the hashes of your old commits now bypassed are still in the reflog. You can always find the hash where "feature" used to point and manually move the pointer back:

  git checkout feature
  git reflog
  (find the hash)
  git reset <hash> # --hard or --mixed if needed

Not that this is obvious or trivial or anything. It shouldn't be this hard. But your commits are safe from almost any way you might destroy them once they're somewhere in your history, at least until unreachable commits are eventually garbage-collected.

[progmetaldev]

I appreciate you taking the time to write all this out for me! This is really helpful in understanding rebasing, and generally how the commits work.

[bulatb]

Great! Happy to help.

Git is like that Brooks quote became software. "Show me Git commands and I'll continue to be mystified; show me history and I won't need your commands."

The official book on their website goes through most of Git like this, if you want to know more. It's really night and day once you know what it's actually doing.