Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[R. Diez]

> "master" is nothing more than a pointer to a
> particular commit.  The commit has references
> to its parent(s), from which you can build a
> whole history.  In general, Git doesn't
> know the name of the branch a developer had
> checked out when a commit was created.
> In fact, in this example, both branches
> could have been called "master" if they
> lived in different developers' workspaces.

I understand. However, let's see if git can cope with this pretty common scenario:

Say I'm a developer with too many projects and little time. I don't really want to find the commit ID at each release and manually make a note on the project's web site. In fact, I have no "official" releases. The "contract" with my users (or co-developers in my team) is simple: check out HEAD, it should always work. If it doesn't, last week it worked well, check out at that point in time and wait until I fix the HEAD.

Now you're saying I cannot reliably checkout last week's versions because yesterday I did a merge from an older branch? You mean that git stores everything with clean graphs and numeric pointers, so it cannot know what this repository looked like last week?

As the developer, I have full control, I can decide what the branches are called and how the public repository is updated/pushed/whatever. I can control the clock so there are no time skews.

What do I have to do in order to be able to reliably checkout last week's versions without too much administrative work? I just want to get the same result today as if I had done a checkout last week from the public repository and had made a back-up copy of the working directory then.

With say CVS and Subversion, that's piece of cake, they already work that way, I don't need to manually keep track of revision IDs or visually inspect the merge tree.

Thanks for your answers,
  R. Diez

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Thomas Rast]

R. Diez wrote:
> 
> check out HEAD, it should always work

Please stop using HEAD like this, you'll just confuse your coworkers
(and yourself).  HEAD denotes the currently checked out commit.
[Unlike SVN it is *not* the most recent version of anything.]  Thus by
definition, 'git checkout HEAD' is a no-op.

The newest commit on a branch is denoted by its branch name, because
as Jens said, a branch is in fact a pointer to its tip[1] commit.

> Now you're saying I cannot reliably checkout last week's versions
> because yesterday I did a merge from an older branch? You mean that
> git stores everything with clean graphs and numeric pointers, so it
> cannot know what this repository looked like last week?

Indeed.  Especially if forced pushes are allowed, there is no way to
know what was in the repo at a given time unless you have (local)
reflogs enabled on remote branches and going back until the time you
want.

> As the developer, I have full control, I can decide what the
> branches are called and how the public repository is
> updated/pushed/whatever. I can control the clock so there are no
> time skews.
> 
> What do I have to do in order to be able to reliably checkout last
> week's versions without too much administrative work? I just want to
> get the same result today as if I had done a checkout last week from
> the public repository and had made a back-up copy of the working
> directory then.

Assuming

* you never do a non-fast-forward (i.e., forced) push
* you never have any clock skew
* you always merge features into master (not the other way around)
* you always push immediately after committing on master

you can get there by using 'git log -1 --first-parent --until=...'
as mentioned in my first email.

I personally think that's crazy and -- if you want to avoid the work
of "really" using submodules -- support Jens's suggestion of having
the buildbot automatically assemble an "I tested this" superproject.



[1] or "head" in lowercase (thus "branch head"), but I prefer tip to
avoid confusion

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[PJ Weisberg]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> wrote:

> I personally think that's crazy and -- if you want to avoid the work
> of "really" using submodules -- support Jens's suggestion of having
> the buildbot automatically assemble an "I tested this" superproject.

Or create a tag in each separate repository, using the same tag name
to indicate versions that were tested together.  Or you could do the
same with a branch, since a branch is basically a tag that moves.  You
would just have to make sure only the buildbot updated that branch.

-PJ

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Jens Lehmann]

Am 23.08.2011 12:04, schrieb PJ Weisberg:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> wrote:
> 
>> I personally think that's crazy and -- if you want to avoid the work
>> of "really" using submodules -- support Jens's suggestion of having
>> the buildbot automatically assemble an "I tested this" superproject.
> 
> Or create a tag in each separate repository, using the same tag name
> to indicate versions that were tested together.  Or you could do the
> same with a branch, since a branch is basically a tag that moves.  You
> would just have to make sure only the buildbot updated that branch.

That would also work, but it might need some scripting. Probably having
some server side hooks to enforce the policy allowing no-one except the
buildbot to change those branches/tags would help here. Also submodules
would make it easier to see when they differ from the commits recorded
in the superproject, so a script running something like "git describe"
in all local repos and displaying the results might be a good idea to
get that information.

How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[R. Diez]

Hi all:

I'm writing a daily build script for all the OpenRISC components, so every day I need to check out several git repositories with the source code of many tools that depend on each other.

The hole process takes hours. In order to minimize the risk of repository skew, I thought I could just take the current date and time, clone all repositories to my local PC and check them all out at that particular timestamp.

I figured out that something like git "checkout HEAD@{2011-08-21 10:00:00}" does not really cut it. I'm getting this warning:

  warning: Log for 'HEAD' only goes back to Sun, 21 Aug 2011 10:00:02 +0200.

The reason is, the timestamp was taken at 10:00, and the repository was cloned 2 seconds later, which means that 10:00 is earlier than the repository. That was totally unexpected, but then I found this in the documentation for "gitrevisions":

  Note that this looks up the state of your local ref at
  a given time; e.g., what was in your local master branch last week.
  If you want to look at commits made during certain times,
  see --since and --until. 

I guess that means the HEAD@{date} syntax does not do what I expected. But hey, it's not the first time I find the git docs hard to follow... }8-)

By the way, it would be nice if the gitrevisions documentation could be improved, as I still don't understand what that really means. Say, for example, an hour ago I had temporarily checked out last year's versions, but half an hour ago I went back to this year's versions. If I check out at HEAD@{1 hour ago}, will I get then last year's version, or this year's?

Anyway, my real problem is with the mentioned --until option. "git checkout" does not understand that option, so I guess I need to feed the date to some other git command in order to get the commit ID for "git checkout", right? Can someone help me here?

Or even better, can someone add this kind of explanation to the "git checkout" documentation? If you are used to other version control systems, and wish to checkout the versions at a particular date, that's the documentation page you first look at.

For extra karma points, git checkout could understand the --until option itself.

Many thanks in advance,
  R. Diez

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Thomas Rast]

I'll basically reply from bottom up so you can see the motivation and
then my suggestions for the solution.

R. Diez wrote:
> 
>   Note that this looks up the state of your local ref at
>   a given time; e.g., what was in your local master branch last week.
>   If you want to look at commits made during certain times,
>   see --since and --until. 
[...]
> Say, for example, an hour ago I had temporarily checked out last
> year's versions, but half an hour ago I went back to this year's
> versions. If I check out at HEAD@{1 hour ago}, will I get then last
> year's version, or this year's?

The @{date} and @{n} syntax refers to the reflog, which as the name
tries to imply, is a log of where *your local ref* was at that
time/step.  Since the HEAD ref is by definition what you have checked
out at the moment, HEAD@{1 hour ago} indeed refers to last year's
version.

> Anyway, my real problem is with the mentioned --until option. "git
> checkout" does not understand that option, so I guess I need to feed
> the date to some other git command in order to get the commit ID for
> "git checkout", right? Can someone help me here?

It is a git-log option (or more precisely, revision walker option).
The main problem is that your request is not very well-defined: in
nonlinear history there will in general be more than one commit at the
time requested.

    ---a----b----c----M----       (M is a merge)
        \            /
         d-----e----f

             ^---- April 1st

Suppose you ask git for "the newest commit as of April 1st" in this
history.  Is it supposed to give you b or d?  [If you think nonlinear
history is easy, try to figure out a good rule in the presence of time
skew, where misconfigured clocks/timezones resulted in parents being
younger than children.]

Hence:

> For extra karma points, git checkout could understand the --until option itself.

It probably never will, because that is an ill-defined request.

You can indeed say

  git log -1 --until="april 1"

to get *one* commit that happened before April 1st, but which one is
up to the order internally used by git.  You can also say

  git log -1 --first-parent --until="april 1"

to get the first such commit along the first-parent ancestry, which
might suit the ticket.

But there is a more fundamental issue.  Let me explain.

> I'm writing a daily build script for all the OpenRISC components, so
> every day I need to check out several git repositories with the
> source code of many tools that depend on each other.
> 
> The hole process takes hours. In order to minimize the risk of
> repository skew

Step back and consider the real problem here.  In the simplest case
you are getting two components A and B which depend on each other,
e.g., A depends on B.  But there is a race condition in the case where
a user updates an API between them in a backward-incompatible way: she
has to update both A and B, and an unfortunate coworker/buildbot may
pull old-A and new-B (or vice versa) and get a broken build.
[Incidentally this seems to be a frequent problem with SVN externals.]

You might say: if only we had a way to record the fact that the
"blessed" version of B to go with old-A is old-B, and for new-A it's
new-B.

And indeed we do.  Submodules were invented to allow B to be "linked"
into A's repository, such that a checkout of any commit of A "knows"
the correct corresponding version of B.  A user who updates the API
can record the update to B inside the API-changing commit in A.

So while you can kludge your way around the problem with clever use of
'git log --until', submodules would be the "correct" solution.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[R. Diez]

Hallo Thomas Rast:

Thanks for your quick answer. Please see mine below.

> The @{date} and @{n} syntax refers to the reflog, which as
> the name
> tries to imply, is a log of where *your local ref* was at
> that
> time/step.  Since the HEAD ref is by definition what
> you have checked
> out at the moment, HEAD@{1 hour ago} indeed refers to last
> year's version.

OK, thanks. That kind of example would be nice to have in the "git checkout" documentation page. In the meantime, I've seen on the Internet that other people also got caught by this... let's say... 'unintuitive' behaviour or documentation. 8-)


> It is a git-log option (or more precisely, revision walker
> option).

In the meantime, I've seen this done with "git rev-list" instead, like this:

  git rev-list -n 1 --before="2010-11-01 11:45:16 +0000" master

Is that the same as with git-log ?


> The main problem is that your request is not very
> well-defined: in
> nonlinear history there will in general be more than one
> commit at the
> time requested.
> 
>     ---a----b----c----M----  (M is a merge)
>         \            /
>          d-----e----f
> 
>             ^----
> April 1st
> 
> Suppose you ask git for "the newest commit as of April 1st"
> in this history.  Is it supposed to give you b or d?

I still don't quite understand how git works, but let me risk a naive statement here. If "a-b-c-M" were 'master', and "d-e-f" were 'new-feature', then on April 1st the current version on 'master' is 'b', because I merged the 'new-feature' branch at a later point in time. Does that make sense?


> Step back and consider the real problem here.  In the

You're right in saying there is a race condition here between developers, and the right solution would be of course to tag which versions work well with each other.

But that problem the daily build is trying to solve is precisely that it's too hard to keep track of all component versions in all repositories. Things just move too fast, and as far as I understand it, git submodules require manual intervention. If I ever tag anything manually, it must have already passed the daily build!

The development model looks like this: the latest HEAD versions of all components should always work well with each other. If something breaks, the daily build will let the developer know by the next day. If two developers make incompatible changes, they'll speak to each other and commit their changes within a few hours. During that time, they will be trouble, but that's quite alright (at least for the moment).

I just didn't want the daily build to add to the uncertainty of what went wrong by introducing a few hours' worth of random time skew to the mix.

The daily build server needs to check out from git the head status at say 02:00 am on all repositories, as if the server had so many CPUs that it had ran a "git pull" for all of them simultaneously. That's close enough for my purposes. Like stated above, if someone merges some old branch at 02:01 am, a user that did a "git pull" on master at 02:00 am would not have seen that merge, that's the effect I would like to achieve.

In the future there will probably be a stable HEAD branch and a development branch with the same name across all git repositories, and the daily build can do both every day. Or maybe the stable versions will not come from git any more, but from .tar.gz files. Another solution to automate releases without so much human intervention would be as follows: if the automated build and automated testing succeeded 3 hours ago, then that timestamp can be entered in the database of "pretty sure it works" versions. The timestamp becomes effectively the version number. Manually coordinating all participants is hard if you don't have so many human resources.

Thanks again,
  R. Diez

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Jens Lehmann]

Am 22.08.2011 17:18, schrieb R. Diez:
> But that problem the daily build is trying to solve is precisely that it's
> too hard to keep track of all component versions in all repositories. Things
> just move too fast, and as far as I understand it, git submodules require
> manual intervention. If I ever tag anything manually, it must have already
> passed the daily build!

Submodules can easily be scripted too. Why don't you let your buildsystem
automatically create a commit with the current HEADs in the superproject
when building and testing all repositories was successful? Then each
developer can use one of those superproject commits as starting point and
happily hack away on a repository. And as a bonus he can see in the
superproject how many changes he did from the nightly build he started
with. And if he doesn't care, he can forget about the superproject until
he needs to sync again.

> The development model looks like this: the latest HEAD versions of all
> components should always work well with each other. If something breaks,
> the daily build will let the developer know by the next day. If two
> developers make incompatible changes, they'll speak to each other and
> commit their changes within a few hours. During that time, they will be
> trouble, but that's quite alright (at least for the moment).

You can decide later if you want to use the superproject to coordinate
such possibly conflicting changes, but that would mean your developers
would have to commit their changes in the superproject too.

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Michael Witten]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 15:18, R. Diez <rdiezmail-temp2@yahoo.de> wrote:
>> The main problem is that your request is not very
>> well-defined: in
>> nonlinear history there will in general be more than one
>> commit at the
>> time requested.
>>
>>     ---a----b----c----M----  (M is a merge)
>>         \            /
>>          d-----e----f
>>
>>              ^----April 1st
>>
>> Suppose you ask git for "the newest commit as of April 1st"
>> in this history.  Is it supposed to give you b or d?
>
> I still don't quite understand how git works, but let me
> risk a naive statement here. If "a-b-c-M" were 'master',
> and "d-e-f" were 'new-feature', then on April 1st the
> current version on 'master' is 'b', because I merged the
> 'new-feature' branch at a later point in time. Does that
> make sense?

O! for the love all that is Holy!

You see, guys? The term `branch' was a TERRIBLE choice.

What git calls `branch master' in your example is just a pointer to
the commit object `M'; it has nothing to do with particular lineages
like `a-b-c-M'.

Please see my discussion with Hilco, starting here:

  http://marc.info/?l=git&m=131364675708355&w=2
  Message-ID: CAMOZ1BsZvXsnnWAPXR7UGKdqOMwuGB-ffaAPk55U_1dcjZUcDw@mail.gmail.com

and this email in particular:

  http://marc.info/?l=git&m=131396006222173&w=2
  Message-ID: CAMOZ1BvpnP_729YOHrrPW3B8wa5c4cLyD_qAQ5rTuy0JqNiiXg@mail.gmail.com

which also includes the following very germane link:

  http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2350536&cid=36903136

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Jonathan Nieder]

Michael Witten wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 15:18, R. Diez <rdiezmail-temp2@yahoo.de> wrote:

>> I still don't quite understand how git works, but let me
>> risk a naive statement here. If "a-b-c-M" were 'master',
>> and "d-e-f" were 'new-feature', then on April 1st the
>> current version on 'master' is 'b', because I merged the
>> 'new-feature' branch at a later point in time. Does that
>> make sense?
>
> O! for the love all that is Holy!

Wait, what's wrong with what R. Diez said?  It's exactly what
--first-parent gives you.

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Matthieu Moy]

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Michael Witten wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 15:18, R. Diez <rdiezmail-temp2@yahoo.de> wrote:
>
>>> I still don't quite understand how git works, but let me
>>> risk a naive statement here. If "a-b-c-M" were 'master',
>>> and "d-e-f" were 'new-feature', then on April 1st the
>>> current version on 'master' is 'b', because I merged the
>>> 'new-feature' branch at a later point in time. Does that
>>> make sense?
>>
>> O! for the love all that is Holy!
>
> Wait, what's wrong with what R. Diez said?  It's exactly what
> --first-parent gives you.

Not really. Suppose, on April 1st, I have

A--B--C <-master
    \
     D--E <-new-feature

Then, I merge from upstream

A--B-----C <-master
    \     \
     D--E--F <-new-feature

and then I push to master, or master fast-forward-pulls from me:

A--B-----C
    \     \
     D--E--F <-new-feature, master

Then, what used to be in master on April 1st is C, but --first-parent
will give you E instead.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Michael Witten]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 16:09, Matthieu Moy
<Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Michael Witten wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 15:18, R. Diez <rdiezmail-temp2@yahoo.de> wrote:
>>
>>>> I still don't quite understand how git works, but let me
>>>> risk a naive statement here. If "a-b-c-M" were 'master',
>>>> and "d-e-f" were 'new-feature', then on April 1st the
>>>> current version on 'master' is 'b', because I merged the
>>>> 'new-feature' branch at a later point in time. Does that
>>>> make sense?
>>>
>>> O! for the love all that is Holy!
>>
>> Wait, what's wrong with what R. Diez said?  It's exactly what
>> --first-parent gives you.
>
> Not really. Suppose, on April 1st, I have
>
> A--B--C <-master
>    \
>     D--E <-new-feature
>
> Then, I merge from upstream
>
> A--B-----C <-master
>    \     \
>     D--E--F <-new-feature
>
> and then I push to master, or master fast-forward-pulls from me:
>
> A--B-----C
>    \     \
>     D--E--F <-new-feature, master
>
> Then, what used to be in master on April 1st is C, but --first-parent
> will give you E instead.

Indeed. That example makes perfect sense when so-called `branches'
master and new-feature are rightfully thought of as the `pointers'
(or, `references') that they are.

Moreover, Jonathan, can't you see that your more knowledgeable mind
has automatically smoothed over the inaccuracies presented by R.
Diez's description? In particular, a `branch' has nothing to do with
walking a commit object's ancestry.

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Jonathan Nieder]

Michael Witten wrote:

> Indeed. That example makes perfect sense when so-called `branches'
> master and new-feature are rightfully thought of as the `pointers'
> (or, `references') that they are.

You are right to point out there is potential for confusion, because
different VCSes model the practice of branching and merging in so many
different ways:

 - a single text field in each commit, as in Mercurial
 - a list of "sticky" keywords attached to each commit, as in CVS
 - special revision numbers, as in CVS
 - special directory names, as in Subversion
 - pointers to the tip of a line of history, as in Git

Each model has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of supporting
different operations one might to perform on a branch:

 - creating a branch
 - advancing a branch
 - studying the history of development on a single branch
 - fetching and pushing
 - renaming a branch
 - deleting
 - comparing the history of two branches
 - merging and deleting the now-merged-in branch
 - merging and not deleting the now-merged-in branch
 - "context switch" from working on one branch to another

In particular, you are right to emphasize that in git's model, "what
was on the foo branch at 12:00pm on Saturday" is just not a well
defined question.  The foo branch tip might have been at commit A on
my machine, commit B on a server we share, and commit C on your
machine, so Git doesn't even bother --- branch refs are pointers into
history rather than participating in the history themselves.

Instead, we can content ourselves with the answers to questions like
"what was in the foo branch at 12pm on Saturday on the server used as
a rendezvous point", by logging in and examining the reflog on the
server.

A nice side-benefit is that branch refs are considered to be _private_
unless they are pushed or mentioned in a commit message.  So there is
no pressure to come up with good names for them.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Andreas Ericsson]

On 08/23/2011 05:54 PM, Michael Witten wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 15:18, R. Diez<rdiezmail-temp2@yahoo.de>  wrote:
>>> The main problem is that your request is not very
>>> well-defined: in
>>> nonlinear history there will in general be more than one
>>> commit at the
>>> time requested.
>>>
>>>      ---a----b----c----M----  (M is a merge)
>>>          \            /
>>>           d-----e----f
>>>
>>>               ^----April 1st
>>>
>>> Suppose you ask git for "the newest commit as of April 1st"
>>> in this history.  Is it supposed to give you b or d?
>>
>> I still don't quite understand how git works, but let me
>> risk a naive statement here. If "a-b-c-M" were 'master',
>> and "d-e-f" were 'new-feature', then on April 1st the
>> current version on 'master' is 'b', because I merged the
>> 'new-feature' branch at a later point in time. Does that
>> make sense?
> 
> O! for the love all that is Holy!
> 
> You see, guys? The term `branch' was a TERRIBLE choice.
> 
> What git calls `branch master' in your example is just a pointer to
> the commit object `M'; it has nothing to do with particular lineages
> like `a-b-c-M'.
> 

Back in 2005 when git was young and fresh, there was a discussion about
what to call things. If memory serves (which it might not), I think
the consensus was that "branch" works just fine, and when someone who
doesn't like it comes along we can just tell them that it's short for
"tip-of-branch pointer", which is far more accurate. A "ref" is always
local though, which is why the reflog (which is used for such date
resolving problems) is never even considered to work on remote refs.
They *can* work on remotes' refs though, which is a slightly different
thing.

Whatever, really. The fact that pretty much everyone seems to know
what a branch is and how it works in git after a (very) brief intro
to it means it's either right on target or that people are so used to
the fact that branch means something different in every scm that they
don't even bother loading the word with some preconceived notion that
used to be right in cvs.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and
terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war
on peace.

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Randal L. Schwartz]

>>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:

Andreas> Whatever, really. The fact that pretty much everyone seems to know
Andreas> what a branch is and how it works in git after a (very) brief intro
Andreas> to it means it's either right on target or that people are so used to
Andreas> the fact that branch means something different in every scm that they
Andreas> don't even bother loading the word with some preconceived notion that
Andreas> used to be right in cvs.

It does lead to confusion though, and once you *really* understand that
a branch is a point, not a line, you can do a lot more cool things with
git, and rebase and stash make a lot more sense.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion

Re: How to check out the repository at a particular point in time

[Michael Witten]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 15:48, Randal L. Schwartz <merlyn@stonehenge.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:
>
> Andreas> Whatever, really. The fact that pretty much everyone seems to know
> Andreas> what a branch is and how it works in git after a (very) brief intro
> Andreas> to it means it's either right on target or that people are so used to
> Andreas> the fact that branch means something different in every scm that they
> Andreas> don't even bother loading the word with some preconceived notion that
> Andreas> used to be right in cvs.
>
> It does lead to confusion though, and once you *really* understand that
> a branch is a point, not a line, you can do a lot more cool things with
> git, and rebase and stash make a lot more sense.

Indeed. I don't think Andreas is correct in the assertion that
"everyone seems to know what a branch is and how it works in git after
a (very) brief intro". Rather, I think it is just the case that
everyone seems to know how to use the basic public interface for
branches after a (very) brief intro, and that many tasks allow
everyone to get away with having wrongheaded ideas.