gitz VS Git

When I develop a big feature, I do it on a private branch, and then I commit and push an "anonymous" commit (using this) whenever I have made any progress.

where git st is here (a lot like git status.)

No, there's no reason to preserve commit messages you used during development.

When I am developing, I make many tiny commits with an automatically generated title ('Modify util/files.py') each time my tests pass, or really, when I do anything of value. (I use `git-infer`: https://github.com/rec/gitz/blob/master/git-infer)

This makes it impossible for me to lose work, and acts like a coarse-grained undo for me, where I can quickly move back and forth between spots that the tests worked if I decide I'm going the wrong way, or create a new branch, move back a bit, and make some changes and compare.

_Before anyone sees this code_ I rebase it down to a logical sequence extremely-carefully named and organized commits. (The word "manicured" has been used more than once.)

As I go through code review, I make tiny commits and at the end, rebase them into my carefully-named commits.

I create at least five commit IDs for each final commit I created. No one wants to see these.

I spend considerable time organizing everything so just the information you need to see is in the final commits. All the information should be there.

I have a truly evil command in my gitz package https://github.com/rec/gitz called git adjust.

I have a bunch of git utilities to do common chores, but more, I tend to stack up a lot of commands at once in the command line separated by &&.

This isn't just academic - it affects every git tool. I have a collection of git utilities, fairly high quality, but a lot of my favorite ones don't work over merge commits, not because I was lazy but because I simply couldn't figure out a way to do it that made sense in every case.

Look at any PR/patch series that got merged into the Git project. https://github.com/git/git/

Any random one. Because those that did not meet the minimum criteria for a well-crafted history would not have passed review.

Boy, I can't find this either (but also, the kernel mailing list is _really_ difficult to search). I really remember Linus saying something like "it's not a real SCM, but maybe someone could build one on top of it someday" or something like that, but I cannot figure out how to find that.

You _can_ see, though, that in his first README, he refers to what he's building as not a "real SCM":

https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...

Here is the direct link, as HN somehow removes the query string: https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=peff&since=2023-10...

I understand all that.

I'm saying, if you write a survey and one of the possible answers is "diff", but you don't clearly define what you mean by "diff", then don't be surprised if respondents use any reasonable definition that makes sense to them. Ask an ambiguous question, get a mishmash of answers.

The thing that Git uses for packfiles is called a "delta" by Git, but it's also reasonable to call it a "diff". After all, Git's delta algorithm is "greatly inspired by parts of LibXDiff from Davide Libenzi"[1]. Not LibXDelta but LibXDiff.

Yes, how Git stores blobs (using deltas) is orthogonal to how Git uses blobs. But while that orthogonality is useful for reasoning about Git, it's not wrong to think of a commit as the totality of what Git does, including that optimization. (Some people, when learning Git, stumble over the way it's described as storing full copies, think it's wasteful. For them to wrap their heads around Git, they have to understand that the optimization exists. Which makes sense because Git probably wouldn't be practical if it lacked that optimization.)

The reason I'm bringing all this up is, if you're trying to explain Git, which is what the original article is about, then it's very important to keep in mind that someone who is learning Git needs to know what you mean when you say "diff". Most people who already know Git would tend to gravitate toward the definition of "diff" that you're assuming (the thing that Git computes on the fly and never stores), but people who already know Git aren't the target audience when you're teaching Git.

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[1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/diff-delta.c