The Thing About Git

Ryan Tomayko: The Thing About Git

The thing about Git is that it’s oddly liberal with how and when you use it. Version control systems have traditionally required a lot of up-front planning followed by constant interaction to get changes to the right place at the right time and in the right order. And woe unto thee if a rule is broken somewhere along the way, or you change your mind about something, or you just want to fix this one thing real quick before having to commit all the other crap in your working copy.

Git is quite different in this regard. You can work on five separate logical changes in your working copy – without interacting with the VCS at all – and then build up a series of commits in one fell swoop. Or, you can take the opposite extreme and commit really frequently and mindlessly, returning later to rearrange commits, annotate log messages, squash commits together, tease them apart, or rip stuff out completely. It’s up to you, really. Git doesn’t"