Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult

[David Kastrup]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:

> Andreas Schwab <address@hidden>:
>> >> That's pretty easy if you are rebasing.
>> >
>> > Explain?
>> 
>> Rebasing takes only a fraction of a second.
>
> And actually changes the timestamps, which I would not have expected -
> as someone else observed, I would have expected that to move the commits
> wuthout changing the metadata. 
>
> That is unfortunate.  I'd mumble that someone could have pointed this
> out six months ago, but it wouldn't have helped because there's no
> better alternative. Looking across VCS metadata, the only things you
> can always get are committer name and committer data. Sometimes author
> name and author are available, but it is not even guaranteed that the
> distinction is portable.  It wasn't in darcs last I checked.
>
> I will document this as a weakness of the technique that we're stuck
> with.  In order for it to create a problem, commits on a branch would
> have to be rebased after someone has already referred to a commit on
> the branch.  It is pretty unlikely that this would happen in a public
> repository, but not impssible.

In order for it to create a problem, commits on a branch would have to
be rebased.  Because at that point of time, commit author+commit date no
longer uniquely identify a commit.

Rebasing again loses the information you use for identifying a commit.
This may or may be another problem.  But the problem of
commitdate+committer not providing uniqie identification for any commit
in a rebased branch is a separate one.

-- 
David Kastrup