Workflows, rebase, patch theory

[Talden]

>  In both cases -- rebase and amend -- this can cause significant grief if
>  they rewrite history after it has been shared with another repository.

For this reason I wish that commits were local until released and that
externals pulls and your pushes never passed local commits out of the
local repo.  Therefore you can rebase and amend as much as you like in
sensible parcels of changes.

Of course this immediately makes the quesiton of how you can locally
backup more complex because you can't just push to one of your own
clones.

I think that, with the Bazaar model of producing merge commits for
bringing in non-conflicting upstream changes you do need to use rebase
to keep history moderately reconsumable for longer term branches - and
those are going to happen in many projects.

You almost want those merge commits to be annotated if they're the
results of the automated merge process rather than any conflict
resolution so you can abbreviate revision graphs - but of course this
effectively records the merge algorithm itself in the commit which is
undesirable.

--
Talden