this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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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?
Branches are distinct.
Let's say you have a main and a dev branch, and you periodically merge dev into main. Because of fast forwarding (on by default) the main branch is completely gone from the history. If you then add bug fixes and project branches it becomes a tangled mess really quickly and it's nearly impossible to understand the structure by looking at the tree.
On mercurial every branch is named and distinct forever. You don't have to try to understand what happened to the project since it's obvious by looking at the tree.
Now there are ways to have a clean git history, but afaik you either need to make sure nobody ever messes it up or have everyone rebase everything and only keep the history of the main branch.
When working in a hyper structured organization that may work, but for more casual developers (scientists, students) that aren't system experts and where you have messy history, mercurial default settings are less confusing, easier to learn and produce better results.
No, merging in git does not make branches disappear.