Re: excellent GIT video

On 2007-11-02 Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

> The important thing about GIT and other DVCSs is that they make
> merging {simple, trivial, elegant, pleasant} right from the
> start.

They also make it private. This is a key that I found Linus
talking about with KDE here:

    http://lwn.net/Articles/246381/

> We can talk all we want about how we can emulate the same
> freedom in Subversion or CVS by "just committing lots of
> half-baked changes to a private branch"... but users are
> *averse* to that.

Again, privacy. Linus' argument is that a big problem is that
branches are globally visible in the centralized model. Most
agree that "commit early, commit often" is desirable, but that's
restricted if your micro-commits are visible to the world, even
if it's only your own buggy branch. The picture to keep in mind
is that of a developer wanting to make a bunch of silly,
potentially embarrassing changes to his local branch while on a
spike, and later sending a super-commit (non-local) agglomerating
and cherry-picking only the "smart" net result of all the
micro-changes. This model better allows a developer to use the
VCS as a scratch pad to record whimsical direction.

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