By "break", I assume he toilet or coffee.

So I assume he means code that he hasn't checked in yet, but might do when he gets back if he can't remember what was doing and it compiles.

Personally, I like to check in broken code late on that Friday evening before I take 2 weeks holiday. Unfortunately, these days with these new fangled source control systems you can't check it out again and keep it locked while you are away.

I never check it in in this state. Checkins are 100% working and passing all tests for me.

Have you heard of distributed revision control? Local check-ins are awesome.

Unfortunately, that doesn't keep some idiots from pushing broken code to `origin master`.

Why can they do so on a mature project? Why can they not only push to their branch, have the repo have commit/push hooks for fast linting, have CI builds for each commit, and only merge into master when comfortable (e.g. after QA)? And if it's a fairly new project and they're working in master directly, what's the harm of broken code?

Even non-idiots make mistakes. Use the pre-push hook that comes with your repo: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/templates/hooks--pre-...

Then, just mark your commits with WIP.

It's no trouble at all to work on a personal branch and merge it back in once it's fixed/complete. Especially if you're planning on doing it and are using a tool like git flow.

If you leave broken commits in the history, you'll make it very hard to use tools like "git bisect". You can "skip" broken commits, but that should be an occasional exception. It doesn't matter if that was on a personal branch either, because once you merge it's all part of the same graph of commits.

I have no problem with broken commits locally, but I don't want to see those in a public tree. Merge or rebase with squashing, please.

A rebase in the personal branch that squashes the broken commit into the ones that fixed it would remove any traces of broken code in the master branch.

> if you check in intentionally broken code ...

Agreed, but that's not what you should do.

Many times I have finished the day with a working commit and push, then I add a compiler-error "todo ..." line to the code locally so that it's clear where I have to resume tomorrow.