Fixing rebase rather than avoiding it

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Matthew D. Fuller writes:

 > AFAIK, _NO_ current system lets you edit the DAG.

OK, so "edit the DAG" is a metaphor for something else.

 > The schism isn't between people wanting the ability to create and
 > switch to a parallel history, and those wanting the ability denied;
 > it's between people who advocate it as a standard component of an
 > everyday workflow, and those who reserve it for extraordinary
 > situations.  It's not really possible to deny that it has costs (it
 > discards information) and benefits (it creates specific
 > configurations); but the two parties evaluate the absolute and
 > relative weights of both VERY differently.

I don't think that is all there is to it.  I described in another post
a system where my editor implicitly adds commits to the known DAG
every 300 keystrokes or so.  I suspect that that is a use of a VCS
that Ben for one is not considering in his discussion.  Of course this
is an extreme and not entirely plausible case, but I think it
indicates that it's not just a question of weighting the costs and
benefits differently.  Rather, the different parties have rather
different models and use cases for VCS.