Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] Add feature release instructions to gitworkflows man page

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:15:08 -0700

Raman Gupta <[email-masked]> writes:

> It might be useful to add some explanation of why one would want to
> rewind and rebuild vs simply continue as is.
>
> I guess the advantage is that the history for next starts out nice and
> clean for the next release, without any cruft from repeated merging of
> topic branches.

Repeated merges are usually not a major issue.  Summarization tools such
as log and shortlog can be told not to list merges.

What matters more is a revert of a topic, that looked promising when it
started, but later found undesirable or premature.  In such a case, the
topic is reverted out of 'next' and but the fact remains in the history
that it was once merged, and it was reverted.  We would want to get rid of
these records at some point to give a chance for another incarnation of
the topic done right a clean slate to retry, and a feature release is a
good point in history to do so.

> The disadvantage is that one must publish the operation and all forks
> must deal with the rebase.

Yes.