[Monotone-devel] Re: Comparison of Monotone and git

[Bruce Stephens]

Brian May <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> This single "feature" [rebase] of git has produced huge (and heated)
> controversy on the debian-devel (and probably other) mailing
> list. It seems everyone has a different idea of when re-basing is
> required, and when it should or should not be used.

Indeed.  And not having the feature is an obvious way of avoiding the
controversy.

On the other hand, there's one case where it's obviously OK for me to
rewrite history: when they're mine and have never left my control.

With CVS, that might be something I'd do in a checkout using quilt.
So I'm storing changes for convenience, and when I've got something I
want to commit, I can do so.  I might do the same with monotone, or (I
guess) I could use kill_rev_locally (though possibly that's more
awkward than using quilt).  git provides suitable tools so I can just
use git for the whole thing (though there are also quilt-like addons
to git).

But sure, it's strictly unnecessary; one could always use merge, just
as you're forced to do with monotone.  It just feels generally cleaner
(IMHO) to "merge" the couple of changes I have locally to the new
upstream version by rebasing them (basically applying the patches to
the new head) rather than really merging.  Mostly doing that keeps the
history more linear, and (perhaps) easier to understand.

[...]