[graypegg]

Not to be annoying, but maybe one of the most useful things git does for me outside of the usual SCM stuff, is git-bisect. Its saved me many hours of debugging.

If you ever run into a case where something is broken (that you can measure, like a test or broken build) but it’s not obvious what change caused the fault, first go to a commit where you know the fault is present.

    $ git bisect start
    $ git bisect bad

Then go to a commit where you know the fault is NOT present. Go back far if you can! This can be in another branch as long as your start and end spots are connected somehow.

    $ git checkout abc123
    $ git bisect good

And after that bisect command, your HEAD will get moved to the mid point between the good and bad commits. Check if the fault is still there, and run either "git bisect good" or "git bisect bad" depending on if it’s resolved or not.

It will keep jumping you to the mid point between the nearest bad commit and good commit till you end up at 1 precise commit that caused your fault.

This works extremely well for configuration changes specifically, where maybe it doesn’t break in CI, but on your local dev machine it does. You can also use this for non-text files like images to find out when 1 part of an image was changed for example.

—

Also if you just want to make normal SCM stuff easier,

    $ git commit -Am "…"

For a combo add-everything+commit

[pigcat]

Thanks for explaining this so clearly! I'm going to try this next time :)