Re: [mylyn-reviews-dev] git best practices

[Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2011-02-07 18.19, Matthias Sohn wrote:

2011/2/7 Lohre, Jan <jan.lohre@xxxxxxx>

when I have a series of commits and rebase them, each and every commit gets individually reapplied. But I will only check the latest one for correctness and consistency (although I could of course go through all commits, get them to my working tree, build and test them). This could lead to commits that would not even compile.

that's true, this is the inherent priceyou have to pay when rebasing a patch series as all 

commits are rewritten. When doing a merge instead only the new merge commit has to 

be tested (if all the other commits have been already tested earlier). But, then the

history isn't linear anymore ;-()

Or if I have a commit introducing a null guard – and on the central git repository somebody removed the possible null condition, after a rebase it looks like I have introduced a null guard where null could never happen.

 

But it's also possible that a merge creates logical nonsense as the algorithm operates on plain

text level and doesn't know anything about semantics. So if you add the null check and then merge

in another change which adds the same null-check three lines earlier the merge won't raise a conflict

but you would end up with a redundant null-check.

The non-sense can come from a merge or a rebase, since both involve conflicts. If a conlict comes from
a merge, you will most likely have a similar conflict in the rebase operation.

With a merge, one can conclude from the merge itself that it was the merge that introduced the non-sense
and not a mistake by the authors of the commits involved.

-- robin