Re: master has switched from Automake to GNU Make

[martin rudalics]

>> Isn't one of the primary purposes of a branch (besides of sharing) to
>> record the historically accurate picture of how its authors arrived at
>> the present state?  If not I really am an idiot wrt version controlling.
>
> It depends.

Whether I'm an idiot ;-)

> The "monotone" version control system absolutely forbids tampering with
> past history; the history increments "monotonically".
>
> But git is more flexible; it allows editing history.
>
> One reason to edit history is because you used the tool wrong (happens a
> lot :).

That's why I initially asked

  "Couldn't we recommend that people don't use forced pushes - even on
   scratch branches?"

With that recommendation people could tell themselves "who cares anyway"
and leave the history alone.  But if we supply a tool that allows people
to hide that they used that tool wrong, then we also supply the social
pressure on people to hide whatever they've done wrong.  Look what clean
history the others got.

Here git frequently pesters me with the message that it cannot complete
my pull request because files I fetched from the repository (and never
touched myself) contain trailing whitespace (usually loaddefs or ldefs
files but otheres as well).  I then remove that whitespace manually and
commit the changes with some crude message text.  Now if I left such
text in a more public place maybe someone would do something about this
annoying whitespeace treatment ...

> Another reason is the scenario Stefan mentioned; you are messing around
> in a branch, finally get it right, and rewrite history to pretend you
> knew where you would end up all along.

That's "finally" once more.  No pretensions here.

martin