Kevin Chiu » git

Git Rebase

Kevin Chiu — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:26:21 +0000

I was having a discussion about git the other day and rebase came up.

My normal workflow didn’t involve rebase; so, my natural curiosity sparked up and I dove into the documentation.

It turns out git-rebase is quite controversial. (And, you should avoid it if you’re sharing your commits.)

Linus Torvalds on rebasing:

* [http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Git_Management](http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Git_Management)
* [http://lwn.net/Articles/291302/](http://lwn.net/Articles/291302/)
* [http://lwn.net/Articles/291303/](http://lwn.net/Articles/291303)
* [http://lwn.net/Articles/291304/](http://lwn.net/Articles/291304/)

Random Redditors:

* [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6ube0/synchronizing_development_rebase_vs_pullmerge_git/?sort=top](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6ube0/synchronizing_development_rebase_vs_pullmerge_git/?sort=top)

Git Blame is awesome

Kevin Chiu — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:36:59 +0000

At work, I manage a software product with 19 contributors, most of whom are no longer active.

For my situation, git blame is seriously awesome.

When someone starts typing their personal email into the code base in some random area and accidentally checks it in, you can figure out exactly who is lazy with focusing their windows.

(I wonder if there’s a way to automatically reject pushes that don’t pass spec tests…)

Todo: check out git bisect

Google Docs should take a hint from Git

Kevin Chiu — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:57:21 +0000

Problem:
You want to revert a change you made to your document without losing more recent changes.

Solution:
Just like a wiki, Google Docs has a revision history. This is like having a magical infinite undo that takes your document back to nearly any state that it was at in the past.

Problem:
Unfortunately, reverting to an older revision causes you to lose any changes you made after doing that old revision. Optimally, you’d be able to undo something in the past without losing everything you’ve done since then.

Solution?
Well, using Git, you can do this easily. Every revision is tagged with a unique identifier, in this case, a SHA1 hash. Calling git revert [hash] reverts ONLY that particular revision, while keeping any work you’ve done since that revision intact.