Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult

[Eric S. Raymond]

Andreas Schwab <address@hidden>:
> >> That's pretty easy if you are rebasing.
> >
> > Explain?
> 
> Rebasing takes only a fraction of a second.

And actually changes the timestamps, which I would not have expected -
as someone else observed, I would have expected that to move the commits
wuthout changing the metadata. 

That is unfortunate.  I'd mumble that someone could have pointed this
out six months ago, but it wouldn't have helped because there's no
better alternative. Looking across VCS metadata, the only things you
can always get are committer name and committer data. Sometimes author
name and author are available, but it is not even guaranteed that the
distinction is portable.  It wasn't in darcs last I checked.

I will document this as a weakness of the technique that we're stuck
with.  In order for it to create a problem, commits on a branch would
have to be rebased after someone has already referred to a commit on
the branch.  It is pretty unlikely that this would happen in a public
repository, but not impssible.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>