Taking the plunge...

[Tom Anderson]

On 4 December 2011 12:19, Dennis Brakhane <brakhane at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Steve Dyer <Steve.Dyer at homeserve.com> wrote:
>
>> So are you saying that bookmarks would be better for feature branches?  How
>> do you maintain the tracebility further down the line? I thought bookmarks
>> were non persistent and confined to the local repository they were made in.
>
> Mercurial's bookmarks are comparable to git branches. Mercurial's
> named branches have no equivalent in git.
>
> Bookmarks used to be local only, but with 1.9(?) they can also be
> pushed and pulled. You are correct, however, that with bookmarks you can only indirectly trace
> which branch contained which feature. But I think in practice it's not much of a problem, as the
> commit messages should give you a pretty good idea. Also, git users don't seem to have a problem
> with it, otherwise git would probably have grown a "permanent branch name" feature by now.

It has - sort of. Okay, Git hasn't, but the popular Gerrit code review
system has a Change-Id which must be written into the commit message:

http://gerrit.googlecode.com/svn/documentation/2.0/user-changeid.html

Gerrit treats changesets with the same Change-Id as part of a single
unit of work, which is handled as one in its interface. It's
essentially a permanent identifier for a feature branch.

Gerrit and its Change-Ids are popular enough that EGit, the standard
Git plugin for Eclipse, supports them. So, no, not part of Git, but a
de facto standard in the Git ecosystem.

tom

-- 
Tom Anderson         |                e2x Ltd, 1 Norton Folgate, London E1 6DB
(e) tom at e2x.co.uk    |    (m) +44 (7960) 989794    |    (f) +44 (20) 7100 3749