Re: Slightly off topic, question about git

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I've recently come to realize a thing with git I really abhor.  It
> has a very loose view on history immutability.  I've seen branches,
> which claims to come from some point, where the branch is way older
> than the revision it claims to have been branched off.  Which
> obviously is impossible.  But history rewriting seems to be a
> favorite pastime of git users.

That's not a fault of git; that's a fault of how some people use git.

I recently had occasion to go through and expunge certain content from
a (git) repo.  It was neither convenient, simple, nor fast, even though
the content in question consisted of two files whose names remained
constant throughout their history.

> For me, one of the really big points of VCS is that history is never
> changed.  I can go back and see what was done, where, to what.

And git can be used that way.  No VCS is ever truly never-change,
unless you use write-once media to store it, and even then it is always
vulnerable to reconstructing a new repo from the ground up based on the
old repo.

> Since git actually is multiple, independent VCSs, what happens on one
> don't necessarily at all come across to another, and in the process
> of aligning them, history have to be rewritten to even get close to
> make some kind of sense.

Not really; history doesn't _have_ to be rewritten.  That's what merge
commits are for.  People just choose to rebase work instead of merging.
(Personally, I think that's a mistake, for various reasons, but, as you
point not, not everyone agrees.)

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