[rhpistole]

Furthermore it's mostly a rant against subversion rather than going making any kind of argument about his assertions.

Plus anybody who advocates the use of git rebase --interactive as a sensible response to code review feedback is clearly insane.

[MrRadar]

> Furthermore it's mostly a rant against subversion rather than going making any kind of argument about his assertions.

A completely misguided rant at that. The author even admits it: "To be fair, you can adopt this workflow with Subversion, using either task branches or patches..." This is exactly how my team uses Subversion (and used CVS before it; yes, we used this exact "branch per issue, code review before merge" workflow with CVS up through 2013) and we don't find the overhead of branching and merging onerous. Granted, I haven't ever tried contributing to an open source project using SVN, but arguably Git is the more-correct tool for that kind of development anyways.

[hyperpape]

We use branches with SVN, but it's slow and creates a lot of overhead on quick tasks. People who can get away with it work out of trunk and commit directly to trunk when they can.

[jsolson]

> Plus anybody who advocates the use of git rebase --interactive as a sensible response to code review feedback is clearly insane.

Why? Prior to a series of changes being pulled into someone else's history you have all the incentive in the world to present the cleanest view of history possible. Moreover, if you can rebase -i on top of master you can turn the merge into a fast-forward rather than an actual merge. A more linear history with fewer merges is much easier to bisect as well as to read, generally.

[rbehrends]

> Moreover, if you can rebase -i on top of master you can turn the merge into a fast-forward rather than an actual merge. A more linear history with fewer merges is much easier to bisect as well as to read, generally.

Au contraire, rebase can break bisect by creating commits that were never actually tested or compiled. And if your bisection algorithm cannot handle merges, then that's a problem with a bad bisection algorithm.

Nor does it make history more readable; it makes history more readable in the same sense that inlining all procedures makes a program more readable (i.e. not really).

Merge commits are an abstraction mechanism. You can view a branch's history as a purely linear history (git log --first-parent) of normal and merge commits, where merge commits represent the merged branches (and where the commit message should summarize the branch changes properly). You can then unfold merge commits and view the branches they represent in such a quasi-linear fashion, too. Repeat as needed.

This can also guide a bisection algorithm (bisect along git log --first-parent, descending down the merge hierarchy as necessary) and is generally more readable if presented properly (that Git doesn't have a tool other than git log --first-parent for this is a different story). Conversely, a fully linearized history is longer and lacks any structure (as I said, it's like manually inlining all procedures in a piece of code).

[SilasX]

I thought the -i option was irrelevant to whether the merge commit is present. It's the "putting your commits directly downstream of master" that avoids the merge commit, not the use of the interactive rebase features. Right?

[ghusbands]

You present a clean history, yes, but not a correct one. The context in which you made your changes, often noted as important, has been lost.

[ajdlinux]

"git rebase -i" is essentially how the entire Linux kernel process works - and IMO it works pretty beautifully. The only real downside I've seen is that it can lead to developers submitting code which breaks bisection due to not testing each individual rebased commit - in the kernel, this is somewhat alleviated by the Intel 0day bot which gives us automated build failure feedback, but it's still an issue. The benefits of a nice clean changelog though should not be underestimated.