Re: Question about your git habits

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Sat Feb 23 2008 - 00:04:22 EST


Daniel Barkalow wrote:
I find that the sequence of changes I make is pretty much unrelated to the sequence of changes that end up in the project's history, because my changes as I make them involve writing a lot of stubs (so I can build) and then filling them out. It's beneficial to have version control on this so that, if I screw up filling out a stub, I can get back to where I was.

Having made a complete series, I then generate a new series of commits, each of which does one thing, without any bugs that I've resolved, such that the net result is the end of the messy history, except with any debugging or useless stuff skipped. It's this series that gets merged into the project history, and I discard the other history.

The real trick is that the early patches in a lot of series often refactor existing code in ways that are generally good and necessary for your eventual outcome, but which you'd never think of until you've written more of the series.

That summarizes well how I do original development, too. Whether its a branch of an existing repo, or a newly cloned repo, when working on new code I will do a first pass, committing as I go to provide useful checkpoints.

Once I reach a satisfactory state, I'll refactor the patches so that they make sense for upstream submission.

Jeff


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