Question about features

[Daniel Carrera]

Top posting:

I think Stephen has characterized my own views quite accurately and 
eloquently. I do like fewer commits and I do think of patches as more or 
less equivalent to features (for an appropriate definition of "feature").

Daniel.

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Ben Finney writes:
>  > Tom Widmer <tom.widmer at googlemail.com> writes:
> 
>  > > Really, you just need to make another commit that corrects the
>  > > problem.
> 
>  > Yes.
> 
> Speak for yourselves.  git and Darcs users take different points of
> view and don't necessarily need more commits; often they strongly
> prefer less.
> 
> Some git users view history as a social construct.  There's no history
> until you tell it to somebody else.  Once you've shared it, though,
> it's community-owned.  So you don't rebase a published branch.  And
> like the Japanese, we like our history to be nice looking.  So we set
> up a "tate-mae", a nice story you can tell in front of your mother.
> More precisely, the DAG of tree objects is of course a connected
> graph, just as the DAG of mathematical theorems is.  And just as
> mathematicians persist in finding new paths, ie producing new proofs,
> for old theorems -- and get published for doing so! -- git users like
> to polish up the history of development.
> 
> Others think more like Darcs users.  rebase is a way to express the
> combinatoric nature of patches and "features".
> 
> Darcs users are yet another type.  Darcs users are too abstract to use
> rebase.  They expect the VCS to do such recombination for them.
> They're also quite ahistorical (not all that surprising given the CPT
> invariance of particle physics ;-).  So where git users think of
> history as a trail of breadcrumbs in a maze of revisions[1], Darcs
> users live in a algebra of recombinant (or commutative) patches.  And
> patches are more or less equivalent to features.  It's not surprising,
> then, that they like to simplify by cancelling inverses, leaving only
> the collection of features, each embodied in a patch, that make up the
> application.
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  Or as I prefer to think of it, hellriding from the Courts of
> Chaos to the Pattern of Amber.
> 
> 
>