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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

No that is correct, and also a habit I am trying to break. The reasonable argument is that we should stop running code with untracked state. Either the changes are important and should be committed or not. Otherwise you are recording code versions that never truly existed during development.

Where this gets extra sticky for me is tooling which refuses to distinguish repo wide config vs a local only version. VSCode being a huge offender where there is only a ‘launch.json’ and no ‘launch.local.json’ suitable for per host customization (eg maybe I am already running something on port 8888, so I need to map it to 9000, that does not mean a quirk of my environment should be committed).

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Counterpoint: Why should my println debugging get committed? They're not "important" for the final product but important for development.

The logic is once you are ready to commit you delete all of the debugging stuff. Otherwise you are committing an illusionary state of the repo that only existed by manipulating the stage.

I am a black kettle here as I frequently commit individual lines amongst a sea of changes, but I do appreciate the theoretical stance of jj.

Just to be clear, jj makes it really easy to carry this sort of thing as a separate patch, so while it may be "committed," that doesn't mean it has to go into what you send upstream.

(though for debug printfs in particular, the Right Thing is proper logging with log levels, but I myself love printf debugging and so sometimes don't do that either. Which is why carrying local patches is nice.)

There is no Right Thing here. Practicality beats purity. The product (a snapshot of the source tree) should do what it needs to do, but getting there is not the product. It can be if you want it to be, but there is no upside to that.

A tool like pre-commit really helps here: it'll run against the staged files, before committing. Your CI tool really ought to be testing the commit too, at which point having a clean commit locally isn't necessary for correctness, only for avoiding needing to re-do your work.

It's really important to catch bugs early, because it's a lot more expensive to fix them later -- even if only as late as in CI before merging.

I think most people would use a logging library (maybe at the "trace" level) at that point.

you've obviously never encountered code which only works when println is added.

Schroedingers branching

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