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0 pointsrandallsquared15y ago0 comments

I haven't used mercurial in anger, and mostly use subversion instead (because that's what my workplace uses at the moment), but:

1) sometimes you commit by accident. This happens to me a few times a year, from hitting the up arrow the wrong number of times and pressing enter.

2) sometimes you say something in a commit message that turns out not to be true, or is just a typo, and especially if you're using commit messages to tie commits to tickets in your bug tracker, this can make code show up on the wrong ticket, or not at all, which is quite confusing for a later maintainer.

0 pointsrandallsquared15y ago0 comments

I haven't used mercurial in anger, and mostly use subversion instead (because that's what my workplace uses at the moment), but:

1) sometimes you commit by accident. This happens to me a few times a year, from hitting the up arrow the wrong number of times and pressing enter.

0 comments

6 comments · 1 top-level

100k15y ago· 5 in thread

It is trivial in Mercurial to back out the last commit: hg rollback

I use it all the time to fix typos, add a file I forgot to add, or whatever. Once you push, it is more difficult, but I try not to push my code until it works. I also commit only tested chunks of code, so that is the "unit of work" I aim for.

The equivalent in git is something stupid, I have to look it up every time: git reset --soft HEAD^

That's intuitive!

jackowayed15y ago

git reset HEAD^ (soft is the default option) is actually pretty intuitive once you're used to git. You're reseting the index to the state it was one commit ago (which is what HEAD^ means. That comes up a lot.)

And if you really forget it often, add this to your ~/.gitconfig:

    [alias]
      rollback = reset HEAD^

Now you can run `git rollback`

100k15y ago

I know what HEAD^ (and HEAD^^^^^ or whatever) mean.

The fact that I have to make aliases for commonly used tasks is not a point in git's favor to me.

1 more reply

randallsquaredOP15y ago

It sounds as though the equivalent mistake would be an accidental push. Good to know that git and mercurial allow you to fix things, in any case.

Xurinos15y ago

git push is reversible, too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079967 (and note my correction below that simplifies things)

graywh15y ago

git commit --amend

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