Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

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quietbritishjim

Mercurial is also great for rebasing (that's cherry picking in Git terminology - not the same as git rebase!). If I had experimental changes, I would often just commit things and mark them as private (so they wouldn't get pushed) rather than shelve (the Hg equivalent of git stash). Then, when I actually wanted them, I would rebase them on to the most recent revision (using --keep so the originals were still there if something went wrong - then I could strip the originals when the dust settled). Hg is so easy to use that you can feel really confident manipulating the commit graph, in a way you normally wouldn't risk in git.

It helps that Mercurial has a really nice cross platform GUI: TortoiseHg. Version control is one of those things that really benefits from a GUI because you're manipulating small elements complex object - the commit graph. Using the command line is bit like using ed to edit a text file (i.e. with commands like "insert xyz between lines 12 and 13").

Yeah Mercurial seems like what git should have been but never will be.

Is there any option to have this "private commits" feature in git? I just realized it's exactly what I wanted so many times. I've tried the assume-unchanged hack but it's too brittle.

I successfully use [stgit][1] (for 10 years) for private commits and pretty much for the rest of near-git workflows.

[1]: https://stacked-git.github.io/

Does stgit help with the following scenario:

1. I want some changes in my repo to be persistent whenever I switch to a new branch, pull, or merge a remote.

2. They should not be shown in git status.

3. They should not be pushed.

From skimming the front page I haven't found whether something like this is supported.

I see that with stgit I can `stg pop` my "persistent changes" before pushing to the remote and then apply it again with `stg push` but that requires that I use stg commands to create patches instead of `git commit`.

For this case `git stash` is enough.

I heavily used mq extension and it was pretty inferior in UX terms to StGit at those times. With StGit there are no any nice features in Mercurial for me.

If only someone had launched hghub.com at the time of github.com.

I remember issues with windows/unix interop for mercurial repos when github started to gain traction.

Bitbucket tried.

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