Completely baffled

Haszlakiewicz, Eric EHASZLA at transunion.com
Mon Dec 5 11:47:12 CST 2011


> -----Original Message-----
> From: mercurial-bounces at selenic.com [mailto:mercurial-
> 
> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:37 AM, Liam Routt
> <liam.routt at mediasaints.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just as a followup, we managed to lose the last two days of work by
> one of
> > our developers today with Mercurial, which really hurts.
> >
> > Prior to doing the checkin of the work he'd done, he did a pull +
> update.

He didn't happen to specify --clean when he ran the update command, did he?


> This is a bad practice and a curse inherited from Subversion and
> similar
> systems (like Bazaar in centrlized mode).
> 
> In distributed VCS you always commit first, then pull and merge (or
> rebase, depends on how confident you are with the tool).  I had a hard
> time explaining my colleagues at work to stop using "hg pull -u" and
> commiting first instead.

For many people that's a completely absurd workflow.  Just because I'm pulling in changes from someone else doesn't mean that I'm anywhere near ready to commit my changes.  I often (i.e. every week) work on things where my local files have assorted changes that are inappropriate to make part of the change history.   e.g. comments I add while figuring out the logic of the code (occasionally obscene, if the code is particularly bad :) ), temporary debugging statements, misguided experiments, etc...
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that works this way; just look at the popularity of things like mq and shelve.

eric


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