On Sat, 14 Jul 2007, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 16:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Why would anybody force you to do that?
The "switch between branchs in the same repo" is really convenient.
But nobody *forces* you to do it.
This is true. I already mirror a bunch of CVS and SVN repositories into
git so that I can use them without too much pain¹, and I can do the same
for git trees which use branches too; mirroring them into a bunch of
separate trees for easy access.
On the occasions I actually try to _use_ branches, I find it very
suboptimal. Perhaps it's just because I'm stupid. I'm sure that's why I
ended up committing changes to the wrong branch. But having to rebuild
(even with ccache) after changing branches is a PITA. Just changing
branches at all is a PITA if you have uncommitted changes (which I
usually do because I've usually tested _some_ random patch in a build
tree for the hardware which is closest to hand). Pulling a whole bunch
of unwanted changes on the 'development' branch while on GPRS, when all
I really needed was a single commit from the 'stable' branch also didn't
amuse me, although I'm sure if I had the time to play with it I'd have
been able to avoid that.
I can, and do, mirror stuff from all kinds of suboptimal version control
systems into single-branch git trees. And I include multi-branched git
trees in my definition of 'suboptimal'. My ability to do that doesn't
really help the newbies who are expected with branches, though.
You can flatten a multi-branched git repo without mirroring into multiple
single-branch repos - The ability to pull out branches into separate trees
from a single repository was what the git-new-workdir script in contrib
was written for.
While I find branches quite a natural concept having used the for the past
few years in Subversion and CVS before that (and after that branches in
git are a delight to use), I still like to have access to all of the
branches that I am working on as separate trees.
git-new-workdir allowed me to do that by scripting an approach described
by Junio. Though maybe it has been superseeded by some built-in feature?
I haven't been following things that closely recently, and ISTR that there
was talk of a feature that would make the script obsolete.
--
Julian
---
You're at Witt's End.
