[Bioperl-l] Merge branch 'master' ?

[Kai Blin]

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 06:35 -0500, Jay Hannah wrote:

> So fangly's procedure (whatever it is), is re-committing other people's commits? Making history twice as long with (empty?) "Merge branch 'master'" messages? The diff of these commits reports that fangly is the author of other people's changes(!) yet somehow git annotate still reports that t/data/ZABJ4EA7014.CH878695.1.blast.txt was authored by Razi Khaja yesterday (correct).
> 
> Am I reading that correctly? I find that history very confusing.

Yes, that's just what's happening here.

> In #moose they taught me to merge other people's commits using the procedure below. This is what I did yesterday to merge rkhaja/bioperl-live into bioperl/bioperl-live (per conversations in IRC). 
> 
>    git remote add rkhaja git://github.com/rkhaja/bioperl-live.git
>    git fetch rkhaja
>    git checkout -b rkhaja-merge rkhaja/master
>    git rebase master
>    git checkout master
>    git merge rkhaja-merge
>    git branch -d rkhaja-merge
> 
> That procedure did not create a "Merge branch 'master'" commit. So is that procedure cleaner than fangly's? Is it the rebase command that makes the difference?
> 
> I'm not picking on fangly here, I'm simply struggling to improve my own git-fu. 

So the question if this is the "better" way of doing things depends on
what you're aiming for. At Samba, we have decided in trying to keep the
history linear by using the rebase method you outlined above. This is
mostly based on the reasoning that nobody cares about our private git
trees we have on our development machines. If you're actively developing
code in multiple public branches, like e.g. the Linux kernel does, it
might be interesting to preserve where these branches split and merge.

Personally, I like the readable history the rebasing gives me.
Additionally, if you write only a few patches, and pull often, you'll
end up with a high "merge commit"/"real commit" ratio, aka "noise". :)

Hope this helps,
Kai

-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Kai Blin         kai.blin at biotech.uni-tuebingen.de
Interfakultäres Institut für Mikrobiologie und Infektionsmedizin
Abteilung Mikrobiologie/Biotechnologie
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen
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D-72076 Tübingen                        Fax : ++49 7071 29-5979
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