by ezst 3 days ago
I'd like to fill up some inaccuracies in your response:
- rebasing in Mercurial simply means chopping a subtree off of the history and re-attaching it to a different parent commit. In that sense, rebasing is a very useful and common history-rewriting operation. In fact, it's even simpler and more powerful/versatile than in git, because mercurial couldn't care less if the sub-tree you are rebasing belongs to a branch or not: it's just a DAG. It gets transplanted from A to B. A may or may not be your checked commit, or be the tip of a branch, doesn't matter.
- that mercurial requires a configuration toggle before rebasing can be used (i.e. that the user need to enable the extension explicitly) is a way to encourage interested users to learn their tool, and grow its capabilities together with their knowledge. It's opinionated, it may be too much hand-holding for some, but there is an elegant simplicity in keeping the help pages and autocomplete commands just as complex as the user can take it.
> rebasing in Mercurial simply means chopping...
Sure, but since commits have a branch attribute attached to them, "rebasing" does not appear to be "first class". It is something that has to be bolted on with an extension.
> because mercurial couldn't care less if the sub-tree you are rebasing belongs to a branch or not
IIUC Git also does not care much about the rebase target being a "branch".
I agree that Mercurial provides more value out of the box than git because it preserves branch info in commits.
I can live with Git because Git is "enough" if used carefully and after coming to terms with the non-intutive UI.
> Sure, but since commits have a branch attribute attached to them, "rebasing" does not appear to be "first class".
Again, that's orthogonal: you may or may not use "named branches" (the kind of which persists at commit level), rebasing works either way consistently and predictably.
> It is something that has to be bolted on with an extension.
The extension ships in core, UX is why it's not enabled by default.
> IIUC Git also does not care much about the rebase target being a "branch".
Indeed, it's just that things likely get weird (for no good reason) when you don't (detached head, "unreachable" commits)
> I can live with Git because Git is "enough" if used carefully and after coming to terms with the non-intutive UI.
That's our sad state of affairs. JJ helps a bit, though.