[eru]

Git history is incredible important, yes, but also limited.

Practically, it only encodes information that made it into `main`, not what an author just mulled over in their head or just had a brief prototype for, or ran an unrelated toy simulation over.

[necovek]

In fairness to GP, they said VCS, not Git, even if they are somewhat synonomous today. Other VCSes did support graph histories.

Still, "3rd dimension" code reasoning (backwards in time) has never been merged well with code editing.

[1718627440]

> In fairness to GP, they said VCS, not Git

I did say VCS, but I also don't know what Git is missing in this relation.

> Other VCSes did support graph histories.

How does Git do not?

> Still, "3rd dimension" code reasoning (backwards in time) has never been merged well with code editing.

Maybe it's not perfect, but Git seems to do that just fine for my taste. What is missing there?

[eru]

> Other VCSes did support graph histories.

Yes, git ain't the only one, but apart from interface difference, they are pretty much compatible in what they allow you to record in the history, I think?

Part of the problem here is that we use git for two only weakly correlated purposes:

- A history of the code

- Make nice and reviewable proposals for code changes ('Pull Request')

For the former, you want to be honest. For the latter, you want to present a polished 'lie'.

[necovek]

Not really. Launchpad.net does not have any public branches I could share atm as an example, but Bazaar (now breezy) allowed having a nested "merge commit": your trunk would have "flattened" merge commits ("Merge branch foo"), and under it you could easily get to each individual commit by a developer ("Prototype", "Add test"...). It would really be shown as a tree, but smartness was wven richer.

This was made possible by using a DAG for commit storage and referencing, instead of relying on file contents and series of commits per reference. Merge behaviour was much smarter in case of diverging tip or criss-cross merges. But this ultimately was harder and slower to implement, and developers did not value this enough and they instead accepted the Git trade-offs.

So you seamlessly did both with a different VCS without splitting those up: in a sense, computers and software worried about that for us.

[eru]

I am not quite sure what you are describing here. Git's underlying commit graph is a DAG.

You can use different, custom merge-drivers (or whatever it's called) for Git to get the behaviour you describe here.

[necovek]

Certainly, but merges are treated differently by default, and getting to this sort of output would require "custom" tooling for things like "git log".

Whereas bzr just did the expected thing.

[1718627440]

You can select whether you want the diff to the first or the second parent, which is the difference between collapsing and expanding merges. You can also completely collapse merges by showing first-parent-history.

Or I do not understand what you mean with "the expected thing".

[1718627440]

> - A history of the code

Which is a causal history, not a editing log. So I don't perceive these to be actually different.

[1718627440]

If you throw away commit messages, that is on you, it is not a limitation of Git. If I am cleaning up before merging, I'm maybe rephrasing things, but I am not throwing that information away. I regularly push branches under 'draft/...' or 'fail/...' to the central project repository.

[eru]

Sure, but you are still supposed to clean things up to make the life of the reviewer easier.

There's an inherent tension between honest history and a polished 'lie' to make the reviewer's life easier.

[1718627440]

The WIP commits I initially recorded also don't necessarily existed as such in my file system and often don't really work completely, so I don't know why the commit after a rebase is any more a lie then the commit before the rebase.

[eru]

It's a 'lie' in the sense that you are optimising for telling a convenient and easy to understand story for the reviewer where each commit works atomically.

[seba_dos1]

The "honest" historical record of when I decided to use "git commit" while working on something is 100% useless for anyone but me (for me it's 90% useless).

git tracks revisions, not history of file changes.

[kalaksi]

Sounds easier (for everybody) to just use comments.

[1718627440]

You put past failed implementation in comments? That sounds like a nightmare. I rather only include a short description in the comment that can then link to the older implementation if necessary.

[kalaksi]

What? No, a short explanation of why some approach doesn't work well.