[Nix-dev] Re: new possible movement to git (?)

[Lluís Batlle]

Hello,

2011/8/30 Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to>:
>  > Yeah, it would be nice if git had information in commits about which
>  > branch the commit was initially performed on. This seems like a
>  > really simple feature, not sure why it doesn't exist.
>
> personally, I don't see why that information is relevant. Branch names
> are a local affair in Git. It's quite possible for two repositories to
> track the same content using completely different branch names. So why
> bother recording the name if it doesn't have any significance outside of
> the repository? Other DVCS make a lot of fuss about branch names, like
> monotone, but I don't see any gain in a distributed project.

I'm very used to having branches and their names tracked by the VCS as
part of the history. That's why I prefer approaches of fossil, svn,
monotone, etc. over git. Otherwise, only the commit log may provide
some context information about the circumstances of the change. So, I
like having named branches tracked by the VCS, instead of simply
having a big graph of file changes with commit logs with no additional
information.

And as for live public branches, as Raskin pointed out, the git
(linux) people tend to simply stand a new repository for that specific
purpose somewhere

I'm also quite against of the possibility of rebasing, as it can
easily make invalid assertions people may want to write in their logs,
like "I've tested the feature and it works". Then there is the
untracked editing of commits, and all that related to history
rewriting to the taste of the publisher, instead of keeping track of
events in their context along time.