Subject: Re: Why is it important to learn git?

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:09:26 +0200

Thomas Rast wrote:
> Tim Harper wrote:
>> How has mastering the advanced features of git helped you to be a
>> better programmer?
> 
> I came from SVN, and I guess the most important change for me was:
> 
>   Learning to make nice, reviewable, working, one-change-per-revision
>   commits.
> 

Seconded. During the CVS days, noone bothered about history, but with
git a it's a veritable goldmine of important information, so it's
important to keep it clean with minimal changesets.

One of our developers was very sloppy about this until he ended up
with a bisection run landing him on a commit that fixed no less
than seven different issues. He spent four days debugging it and
finally had to resort to breaking the issues up and creating the
commits as they should have been on a temporary side-branch and
then bisecting that side-branch. Having done that, he spotted the
error in about 15 minutes. After some swearing, he finally saw the
light. He's actually a happier person now, since bugs that take a
long time to solve upset him quite enormously and now he never runs
into any :-)

Apart from that, the various ways of cooperating over large distances
(easy branching + merging, patch sending/applying utilities) are a
huge benefit for us.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and
terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war
on peace.