No, git has labels on heads of branches. Once the head moves you loose the information. It also makes for a more messy history, which I believe created the whole “rebase everything” philosophy to cope.
If I hand you a commit, you cannot tell which ‘branch’ it is on without searching the git history and hoping that you only get one answer. That’s a bummer if, for instance, you’re a github action and only get handed the commit. If it’s on the master branch, I want to do different things than if it’s a dev branch.
Git branches are very different to Mercurial branches. In git they’re similar to tags that move along with the head commit of that particular branch. In Mercurial every commit contains meta data indicating the branch it’s on. It also has a query language that lets you do sone quite neat things with selecting groups of commits based on their metadata, which can be useful in code reviews and similar.
I’ve never used Mercurial, but a simple one based on the explanations and my experience with Git:
Locating the branch a commit originated from.
If a git branch has been merged into (or rebased on) main or another branch, there’s no way to tell which commit came from which branch. But sometimes I’d really like that information to figure out what prompted a certain change. Without it, I need to use external tools like a ticketing system and hope the other developers added in the necessary information.
That seems to be the opposite of useful if a commit is initially pushed to a development branch, which is relatively standard practice; now you’re polluting the tree with data that’s purposefully ephemeral, and even potentially leaking internal information.
Also, I’d argue that such deep details do belong in another tool, rather than asking the source control tool perform triple duty by being a CR and issue tracker as well.
What do you mean by “are a thing?” Git has branches.
No, git has labels on heads of branches. Once the head moves you loose the information. It also makes for a more messy history, which I believe created the whole “rebase everything” philosophy to cope.
What information is “loosed” when another commit is made to the branch?
If I hand you a commit, you cannot tell which ‘branch’ it is on without searching the git history and hoping that you only get one answer. That’s a bummer if, for instance, you’re a github action and only get handed the commit. If it’s on the master branch, I want to do different things than if it’s a dev branch.
A commit all by itself doesn’t mean as much without context.
Why would I not want to be able to apply a commit to any arbitrary branch?
Also, GitHub is not git - it’s based on git. Any shortcomings it may have aren’t necessarily due to a flaw in git.
Luckily a commit points to its parent, which means the context is inherently present. What’s your point?
Nobody said that.
True enough.
Your claim appears to be that Mercurial binds commits to branches, and I’m explaining how I fail to see the advantage.
It makes the history clearer.
How is a Mercurial commit tree clearer than a git commit tree?
Git branches are very different to Mercurial branches. In git they’re similar to tags that move along with the head commit of that particular branch. In Mercurial every commit contains meta data indicating the branch it’s on. It also has a query language that lets you do sone quite neat things with selecting groups of commits based on their metadata, which can be useful in code reviews and similar.
That just sounds like an implementation detail.
Can you provide an example of something that’s possible in Mercurial, but not git?
I’ve never used Mercurial, but a simple one based on the explanations and my experience with Git:
Locating the branch a commit originated from. If a git branch has been merged into (or rebased on) main or another branch, there’s no way to tell which commit came from which branch. But sometimes I’d really like that information to figure out what prompted a certain change. Without it, I need to use external tools like a ticketing system and hope the other developers added in the necessary information.
That seems to be the opposite of useful if a commit is initially pushed to a development branch, which is relatively standard practice; now you’re polluting the tree with data that’s purposefully ephemeral, and even potentially leaking internal information.
Also, I’d argue that such deep details do belong in another tool, rather than asking the source control tool perform triple duty by being a CR and issue tracker as well.