Question about features

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ben Finney wrote:
> Tom Widmer <tom.widmer at googlemail.com> writes:
> 
>> Bazaar is quite bad at history editing of this kind I think. It's very
>> hard to uncommit changes that have already been incorporated into
>> other branches/looms/pipelines.
> 
> I would rephrase that as: Bazaar is very good at ensuring the branch is
> always in a fit state for sharing with anyone, if you choose to do so.
> It doesn't force me to decide when I need to avoid certain operations
> that don't play well with other branches.
> 
>> Really, you just need to make another commit that corrects the
>> problem.
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> Note that both of these will tend to keep the history of all your
>> experiments, which you seemed to want to avoid.
> 
> I'll point to a 2008 article I recently found examining this:
> 
>     Despite the disadvantages, I regularly hear people, mainly git
>     users, say how great rebase is. When I ask why the answer is always
>     something like “to clean up my commits”. So I'll ask what they want
>     to clean up, and why. Eventually I realize that they don't actually
>     want to lose their history, what they really want control over how
>     their code is displayed and delivered.
> 
>     […]
> 
>     So what can you do instead of using rebase? Stop conflating “the
>     series of patches I want to share” with “the revision history of my
>     work”.
> 
>     <URL:http://bemusement.org/diary/2008/July/29/rebase-criticism>
> 
> I imagine the article's thrust is also applicable to Darcs's history
> altering operations.
> 

I also blogged about this a little while back:
http://jam-bazaar.blogspot.com/2009/10/refactoring-work-for-review-and-keep.html

Which is where I did a bunch of work on several inter-related features,
and then split them up into multiple branches-for-review afterwards.
There certainly could be more tool support to make it easier to do (bzr
refactor --interactive ?), but by no means is it necessary to rebase
your history to get 'clean patches for review'.

John
=:->

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