
Linus' blog: Happiness is a warm SCM - Anon84
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/06/happiness-is-warm-scm.html
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etal
I found his example rant informative:

[http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-
devel@lists.sourceforge.net/...](http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-
devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg39091.html)

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jsonscripter
Nifty. Not at all what I want to use Git for, but nifty nonetheless. I like
seeing my mistakes and reasons for doing things.

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Oxryly
> I like seeing my mistakes and reasons for doing things.

I suppose the point of Linus' rant is: would you want other people to see your
mistakes? (goes without saying you would want them to see your reasons for
doing things.)

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jsonscripter
I would love to! The other day I was trying to figure out why a particular bit
of code was added to libpoppler, but the author had compressed all his commits
into one massive 800 line commit. Totally useless to me.

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jerf
There's different "mistakes" that can be made. Unnecessarily squashing (what
you described, in git terms) is a mistake, but not really of the kind Linus is
talking about. He's talking about things like "I committed a couple of
commits, then took a different approach with a couple of more commits, then
realized that didn't work and went for a different answer, then took a couple
of commits to clean up the resulting debug code". There's no reason to leave
all the temporary debug code (as opposed to permanent logging code) in there,
or to leave the abortive approach in the history for others. Extra stuff like
that just imposes cognitive gain for no value, in general. (If you have a
specific case where that's not true, go for it, but you're probably still
better off just dropping some comments into the final code.)

