Re: Stash

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > This is the main part that describes the "merge" step of "git pull":
  > it says it performed a "fast-forward" (see below), and then shows one
  > line for each updated file with "diffstat" form of statistics of
  > changes in each file.  The last line is a summary of the changes.

  > As you see, this is not very different from what CVS and bzr displayed
  > in these circumstances.

Here are some important differences:

* cvs up indicates in a very visible way which files I have local changes in.

  What's more, if it mentions many other files, I can do cvs up again
  immediately and see ONLY the files I have local changes in.

* cvs up will not "fail".  The worst that can happen is that some
  file has a conflict, and if I don't bother with it immediately,
  I will get reminded of it later.

* git pull outputs lots of unhelpful detail when nothing is wrong.  To
  READ all that would be a useless pain in the neck, so I only checked
  to see when it finished.  Thus, on the occasion when (we now
  suspect) it reported a real problem, I didn't notice.

  > The only major difference

It is a mistake to focus on "major" (i.e., fundamental) differences.
A superficial difference can have a big effect on reliability.
The three differences above may not be major, but they are very important.

                              between "git pull" and "cvs/bzr update" is
  > that the latter didn't expose the "fetch" and the "merge" parts to the
  > user (CVS couldn't expose it because everything was done on the
  > server).

People said that git merge can fail for another reason (I forget
what), not only because of conflicts.  It looked like that might be
what happened to me, which led me to edit an old lisp/ChangeLog file
even though I had just done a git pull.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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