I agree that merge is the easier strategy with amateurs. By amateurs I mean those who cannot be bothered to learn about rebase. But what you really lose there is a nice commit history. It's good to have, even if your primary strategy is merging. And people tend to create horrendous commit histories when they don't know how to edit them.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Honestly, I'm pretty sure 99.9% of git users never really bother with the git history in any way that would be hindered by merging.

Git has a ton of powerful features, but for most projects they don't matter at all. You want a distributed consensus, that's it. Bothering yourself with all those advanced features and trying to learn some esoteric commands is frankly just overhead. Yes, you can solve great problems with them, but these problems almost never occur, and if they do, using the stupid tools is faster overall.

[–] technom@programming.dev 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Only users who don't know rebasing and the advantages of a crafted history make statements like this. There are several projects that depend on clean commit history. You need it for conventional commit tools (like commitzen), pre-commit hook tools, git blame, git bisect, etc.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

Uuuh, am I no true Scotsman?

Counter argument: why do you keep fucking up so bad you need these tools? Only users who are bad at programming need these. Makes about as much sense as your accusation.

You keep iterating the same arguments as the rest here, and I still adhere to my statement above: hardly anybody needs those tools. I literally never used pre-commit hooks or bisect in any semi-professional context. And I don't know a single project that uses them. And before you counter with another "well u stoopid then" comment: the projects I've been working on were with pretty reputable companies and handled literally billions of Euros every year. I can honestly say, that pretty much everyone living in Germany had his/her data pushed through code that I wrote.

[–] chamomile@furry.engineer 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

@agressivelyPassive @technom That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, IMO. Well-structured commit histories with clear descriptions can be a godsend for spelunking through old code and trying to work out why a change was made. That is the actual point, after all - the Linux kernel project, which is what git was originally built to manage, is fastidious about this. Most projects don't need that level of hygiene, but they can still benefit from taking lessons from it.

To that end, sure, git can be arcane at the best of times and a lot of the tools aren't strictly necessary, but they're very useful for managing that history.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'd still argue, that the overhead is not worth it most of the time.

Linux is one of the largest single pieces of software in existence, of course it has different needs than the standard business crap the vast majority of us develop.

To keep your analogy: not every room is an operating room, you might have some theoretical advantages from keeping your kitchen as clean as an OR, but it's probably not worth the hassle.

[–] chamomile@furry.engineer 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@agressivelyPassive You should still clean your kitchen though, that's my point.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

Did I say anything otherwise?

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

To keep your analogy, most people's git histories, when using a merge-based workflow, is the equivalent of never cleaning the kitchen, ever.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

No, it's not. And you know that.

Seriously, ask yourself, how often did the need arise to look into old commits and if it did, wasn't the underlying issue caused by the processes around it? I've been in the industry for a few years now and I can literally count on one hand how often I had to actually look at commit history for more than maybe 10 commits back. And I spend maybe 10min per year on that on average, if at all.

I honestly don't see a use case that would justify the overhead. It's always just "but what if X, then you'd save hours!" But X never happens or X is caused by a fucked up process somewhere else and git is just the hammer to nail down every problem.