Git vs. Fossil: what you should have done vs. what you did

Re:Git vs. Fossil: what you should have done vs. what you did by globular-toast on Monday July 05, 2021 @10:47AM (#27738517)

Completely agree. What on earth is the value in knowing that John decided to commit something at 11:24 29 days ago that may or may not have been complete rubbish?

The only reason I am aware of for keeping history is bisecting it to track regressions. The "development history" is completely useless for this purpose. What I want is the version history. That's why git is called a version control system.

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Re:Git vs. Fossil: what you should have done vs. what you did by wyoung2 on Monday July 05, 2021 @11:01AM (#27738654)

If John's rubbish ended up in the merge down to trunk, then you absolutely do want to know about that individual commit.

If you've never received a 500-line patch with a one-line error in it, you haven't been developing collaboratively for very long. Me, I want all 10 commits so I can see from the commit message why the third commit broke the build on platform X, the one clearly tested only on platform Y. I don't want to disentangle the whole mess-o-hackage with a single vague commit comment ("added the foo feature") when faced with such problems.

Am I going to want each and every commit for all history? Of course not, but they're cheap to store, and Fossil makes it easy to ignore the ones not immediately in front of you.

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Re:Git vs. Fossil: what you should have done vs. what you did by gwd on Monday July 05, 2021 @11:28AM (#27738922)

> If you've never received a 500-line patch with a one-line error in it, you haven't been developing collaboratively for very long.

Which is why after I've finished doing the development of a big change, I want to rewrite the history into a series of logical patches, each exactly the right size for review.

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