2009/9/16 JiHO <jo.lists@...400...>:
Tidying history is helpful. It enables people to go off on experimental tangent branches knowing that they can bring order out of chaos when they're ready. It also means that we don't have to have patches merged that break inkscape. It's good to keep a clean history, and you can use bisect to find problems in that case.
Uhm, I don't see how changing the number of revisions would effect how the patch applies in any case. Neither would which changing which revision the branch started on.
I don't think Max was saying that, when you are on a personal branch, you might commit something that you later discover breaks Inkscape.
(Disclaimer: The email quoted above was not from me.) In any case, I was mainly talking about my current workflow when working on Inkscape. I use git-svn to work with git locally and to push my changes back to the central SVN repository when I'm done. During my development I usually create a lot of temporary branches to examine ideas or to reorganize/cherry-pick previous work (which git makes very easy). Since the "best" way to achieve things usually only emerges during the work, it's extremely helpful to combine or reorder patches in this process. When I think my work is ready to push, I can arrange everything so that the patches make most sense, push the patch-set to the SVN repository and delete the temporary branches. Thus the visible result in trunk is (hopefully) easy to follow and comprehend while I still have maximal freedom during my local programming work. I hope this makes things a bit clearer.
Max
P.S.: Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding: I'm *not* talking about rewriting publicly visible history (which AFAIK isn't possible anyway). But for rewriting/reordering your local history before making it visible, git's tool's are immensely useful.