> MQ lets you do the exact same thing as the interactive rebase. It's not like it forces you to go back and ensure every single patch is correct after you've qfolded some together or reordered them.

It doesn't force you, but by providing easy ways to push and pop patches it encourages it.

> And you can do the exact same thing with your git commits before pushing them, last time i checked MQ had `qpush -a` and did not force you to run your tests between two qpushs.

What's the git equivalent of `hg qrefresh`? What about when there are other commits on top of the current one?

> No you can't. Because if it's a changeset (rather than a patch in a series) then you've already qfinished it and pushed it to a public repository, and you're now rewriting public history.

In this case I meant that you don't qfinish the patches right away. You leave them as patches while you submit them to the mailing list.

You're talking about pushing to a public repository, which is different than patch bombing a mailing list. In that case the "MQ" way to do it is to push your patch repo somewhere, and other people can grab your patches that way.

It's a bit more complicated, but it does have the nice effect of giving you a "history" of a series of changesets. I don't know how you'd do that with git.

> I don't like git for a number of reasons, but this is a terrible strawman: git provides all the tools needed to ensure each and every commit is correct (whereas bazaar, for instance, doesn't. Not without untold amounts of pain anyway), and I've seen a number of blag posts and comments which recommended exactly that approach: tinker on your local branch, rewrite to your heart's content, and before you push anything to remote test each commit individually. There is nothing which prevents you from doing that, just as there is nothing that forces you to do that with mercurial.

I agree that you can do those things in git -- I'm only say that it doesn't encourage it. The existence of the index actually encourages doing it the wrong way: checking in states of code you've never tested.

No, Mercurial doesn't force you to do it right, but MQ and its qpush/qpop provide an easy way to do it the right way if you want to, and versioned patch queues makes it easy to track history of patches if you need that kind of power.