Re: Git drawbacks?

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 04:11:48PM +0000, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:
> Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> 
> > Actually, in most use cases, there is no reason to have more than one
> > working tree. Git is designed to work well with plenty branches and one
> > working tree. So, switching between two branches and recompiling a few
> > changed files is much faster then going to another directory and try to
> > work there, because when you go to another directory, you may hit cold
> > cache and disk is *slow*... Another thing is that you can do a lot of
> > things without checking out some branch. You can grep any revision in
> > your repository, you can insect any file from it, etc and you do not
> > have to checkout this revision in your working tree.
> 
> Shouldn't I even worry about my not yet commited changes before switching the 
> branch?

You probably want to use 'git stash save' and when you return back you
just do 'git stash pop'. Also, keep in mind that you can amend any
previous commit using 'git commit --amend'.

> 
> I would say that this approach does not work if the build and test could take
> significant time.

Yes, but then I do not see any reason to do any time consuming building
and testing in the working tree. I create a snapshot of the interesting
version using 'git archive' and then run build&test on it... In this
way, I can make sure that the archive I deliver is tested properly. If
you do your testing in the working tree, sometimes uncommitted or some
other files that are left over from previous builds may affect result.
So, if it takes considerable time anyhow, why do not do clean build and
test? And if you worry about compilation time, you can use ccache.


Dmitry