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Comment by patrick451 | Hacker News Reader

The end state of a culture that embraces restart/reboot/clear-cache instead of real diagnoses and troubleshooting is a cohort of junior devs who just delete their git repo and reclone instead of figuring out what a detached HEAD is.

I don't really fault the junior dev who does that. They are just following the "I don't understand something, so just start over" paradigm set by seniors.

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It’s not either / or.

If you have proper observability in place then you can do your diagnosis without affecting your customers.

>diagnosis without affecting your customers.

Plus, at the same time successful diagnosis is also the kind that can have the most dramatic effect on your customers.

In a positive way.

Sure, but at risk of repeating myself: it’s not either /or. Nobody is suggesting analysis shouldn’t happen. Just that it doesn’t need to happen on a live system.

Honestly, there's a certain cost-benefit analysis here. In both instances (rebooting and recloning), it's a pretty fast action with high chances of success. How much longer does it take to find the real, permanent solution? For that matter, how long does it take to even dig into the problem and familiarize yourself with its background? For a business, sometimes it's just more cost effective to accept that you don't really know what the problem is and won't figure it out in less time than it takes to cop-out. Personally, I'm all in favor of actually figuring out the issue too, I just don't believe it to be appropriate in every situation.

There is a short term calculus and long term calculus. Restarting usually wins in the short term calculus. But if you double down on that strategy too much, your engineering team, and culture writ large, will lilt increasingly towards a technological mysticism.

To be fair, with git, specifically, it's a good idea to at least clone for backup before things like major merges. There are lots of horror stories from people losing work to git workflow issues and I'd rather be ridiculed as an idiot who is afraid of "his tools" (as if I have anything like a choice when using git) and won't learn them properly than lose work thanks to a belief that this thing behaves in a way which can actually be learned and followed safely.

A special case of this is git rebase after which you "can" access the original history in some obscure way until it's garbage-collected; or you could clone the repo before the merge and then you can access the original history straightforwardly and you decide when to garbage-collect it by deleting that repo.

Git is a lot less scary when you understand the reflog; commit or stash your local changes and then you can rebase without fear of losing anything. (As a bonus tip, place “mybranch.bak” branches as pointers to your pre-rebase commit sha to avoid having to dig around in the reflog at all.)

I would never ridicule anyone for your approach, just gently encourage them to spend a few mins to grok the ‘git reflog’ command.

Then submodules enter the picture. I’m comfortable with reflog, but haven’t fully grokked submodules yet, easier to reclone.

If you’re not super comfortable with Git, before rebasing, simply:

- Commit any pending changes.

- Make a git tag at your current head (any name is fine, even gibberish).

If anything “goes wrong” you can rollback by simply doing reset hard to the tagged commit.

Once done, delete the tag.

Making a complete “backup clone” is a complete waste of time and disk space.

Isn't the whole purpose of GIT Version Control? In other words to prevent work loss occurring from mergers and/or updates? Maybe I'm confusing GitHub with GIT? PS I want to set up a server for a couple of domain names I recently acquired, it has been many years so I'm not exactly sure if this is even practical anymore. Way back when I used to distribution based off of CENT OS called SME server, is it still common place to use a all in one distribution like that? Or is it better to just install my preferred flavour of Linux and each package separately?

Git does source code management.

The two primary source code management activities developers use are versioning of source code (tracking changes which happened over time) and the other being synchronisation of code with other developers.

One of Git’s differentiating strengths is it being decentralised, allowing you to do many operations in isolation locally without a central server being involved. You can then synchronise your local repository with an arbitrary number of other copies of it which may be remote, but you may need to rebase or merge in order to integrate your changes with those of other developers.

Git is more like a local database (it even allows multiple local checkouts against a single common “database”) and it only occasionally “deletes” old “garbage”. Anything you do locally in Git is atomic and can always be rolled back (provided garbage collection hasn’t yet been performed).

Although I’m comfortable enough with using the reflog to rollback changes (I’m also skilled enough in git I haven’t needed to in many years), it’s not very user friendly, it’s essentially like sifting through trash, you’ll eventually be able to find what you lost (provided it wasn’t lost too long ago), but you may have to dig around a bit. Hence my suggestion of tagging first, makes it easy to find it again if needed.

I have very limited Linux experience and have no recommendations on your other question.

Thank you for the well detailed response to my question. I'm currently working on returning to the CS Field due to a devastating and career ending injury. The specific Field I'm interested in his programming the interface between hardware such as robotics and user interfaces. So much has changed over the past decade I feel like I'm having to start all over and relearn everything to do with programming! And on top of that I have to also relearn how to live as a quadriplegic! Thank goodness for the Internet and it's incredible amount of free knowledge available these days!

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