Re: [Monotone-devel] Comparison of Monotone and git

[Brian May]

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> >  * History rewriting:
> >     - Git has an easy UI for re-writing history in a local repository
> >       - The re-base command that allows patch sets to be cleaned up
> > before submission
> >       - There is no reason this couldn't be done in monotone, but it
> > goes against the Monotone philosophy.  You'd end up using a bunch of
> > mtn kill_rev_locally' style operations that Monotone considers
> > dangerous.
> >     
This single "feature" of git has produced huge (and heated) controversy 
on the debian-devel (and probably other) mailing list. It seems everyone 
has a different idea of when re-basing is required, and when it should 
or should not be used.

If I understand anything, some people argue that the history needs to be 
"clean" for future reference, some people argue it doesn't matter, while 
other people argue re-basing should never be used on public repositories 
because it messes up other branches people might be working on, while 
others go ahead and do just that.

Personally I like monotone's model that history, once written, never 
changes. It is a permanent record of who did what/when/why. It it meant 
to be messy.

Then again I skipped over large parts of these flame wars, so I might 
have missed something.

Disclaimer: I don't really understand what this feature does. ;-)

Brian May