Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aidenn0 4999 days ago
Let's compare git to SVN.

With SVN your only real option is to commit something that is working, right? If you commit something broken to SVN then you will likely get yelled at.

With git, you can make a few changes, then think "hmm that might not be the best way to fix it" do a commit and then rip out everything you just did and do it a different way.

Or maybe you Added some instrumentation for debugging the problem, committed, then fixed the problem, committed, then removed the instrumentation.

In both cases git has let you save off information that you might need during the bugfix process, but ultimately isn't needed in the final history. With SVN, you likely wouldn't check in those intermediate steps so the final history in SVN would be a single commit of "Fix bug foo"

Is there any need for everyone to have these intermediate commits in their history? I guess that's a matter of taste. I think the main thought is that rebases improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the changelog.
1 comments
krzyk 4999 days ago
Does using rebase or squash leave the history in my local repo and "squash" the commits to a single one in the master?

Sorry for basic questions but I'm new to git.

link
jcoby 4999 days ago
No and yes (respectively). Rebase rewrites the history of whatever branch you are on. Squash converts a merge into a single commit on another branch.

Say you are working on a feature in a branch and have made several commits. Now it's time to clean them up in preparation for a merge. You can either squash the entire branch into one revision into master and create a new commit message (git merge --squash) or you can rebase.

If you rebase, you can use interactive mode (git rebase -i) and rewrite your local history however you see fit. You can reorder commits, remove commits, merge commits, edit commits, edit commit messages, anything. It's extremely powerful and lets you make the history of your current branch into whatever you want it to be. I use rebase -i quite a bit to merge "typo" commits into the original commit. Used sparingly rebasing really helps to keep your timeline clean.

You can also rebase while in master but you should not go older than the newest shared commit (origin's HEAD) nor should you edit other people's code during a rebase.

link