On 27 March 2011 20:15, Neil Schemenauer <n...@python.ca> wrote: > Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote: >> What is "rebase"? Why does everyone want it and hate it at the same time? [...] > The other school, which I am a member of, considers a logical > development sequence more important than actual development history. > I like to see a feature or fix developed in smallish, logical steps > and I'm willing to spend a lot of time to rewrite patches to make it > happen. IMO, future maintainers will thank you for the effort.
This philosophy is essentially what the "mq" extension to Mercurial tries to capture. In mq, you maintain a series of patches "on top of" your repository, amending, refining and rebasing them as you wish until they are ready to commit, at which time you take them off the patch queue and convert them into final commits in the repository. The one downside of mq is that you do not get the usual benefits of distributed version control - local commits of your work, branching to manage experiments, etc. This isn't really surprising, as that sort of "messy" development doesn't really fit with a nice clean picture of logical and well-defined patches (at least, it doesn't fit easily enough that it can be automated :-)). There is a facility in mq to try to integrate the two, by versioning your patch queue, but that makes my head hurt, so I can't really comment on how useful that is... For people in the "clean history" school, I'd recommend looking at mq for your personal use. But it's definitely an advanced feature of Mercurial, so it may be better to understand core Mercurial (and at least temporarily accept that Mercurial is based on the "keep all history" school of thought, or you'll struggle to match the assumptions of the documentation to your thinking :-)) before diving into mq. Paul. PS You can do everything that mq provides using core Mercurial commands - and in theory, do it more safely - but it won't necessarily fit the way you think quite as well... _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
