But when you call it "anonymous branching" you lay bare that the only advantage is that you don't need to name your work "branch", and meanwhile you have a workflow that's needlessly incompatible with most other git tooling.
In particular, since this is the one I see usually called out as a benefit of branchless:
Stock Git does not have good ways of rebasing a sequence of branches.
A sequence of branches can be rebased by rebasing (or otherwise rewriting) the longest one (the only one you'll need locally) then pushing the individual commits in the current branch to the remote under any relevant branch names. This doesn't take zero time, but with good git UIs it will take less time than remembering `git move`, and it's not especially hard to do with the stock CLI either.
> But when you call it "anonymous branching" you lay bare that the only advantage is that you don't need to name your work branch
Sure, I'm only responding to what you were saying about "There is no such thing; considering one special branch as 'not a branch'". There is such a thing in that there is no branch involved in the detached HEAD state. It's not some kind of Git misunderstanding. I think you might be referring to trunk-based development and always building off of the remote main branch instead of having your own local copy, which is unrelated to being "branchless", for the reasons you stated.
For many people (particularly those on Github!), a branchless workflow won't help, so you're free to not use it. In my opinion, it's a workflow that is better compatible than stock Git with code review tools like Gerrit and Phabricator.
I personally argue that anonymous branching is useful even in some branch-based workflows. Mainly, if Git branches are so lightweight to use, why do we also use the command `git stash`, instead of just always creating a new branch for our temporary work? One benefit of anonymous branching is that it consolidates these workflows in a convenient way. Some people don't stash changes or feel that branching in those cases is heavyweight, so anonymous branching doesn't help them at all.
> then pushing the individual commits in the current branch to the remote under any relevant branch names
If I'm understanding correctly, every time you rebase the longest branch, for each commit in the branch, you would manually run e.g. `git push <commit> origin:my-branch-name`? That seems like it would take a lot of time to me. Is the tacit assumption here that you don't have a lot of commits in your branch, so this doesn't take a lot of time?
> There is such a thing in that there is no branch involved in the detached HEAD state.
But at the very least there's still an existing remote branch, which is the ultimate merge target, for example - perhaps even multiple. Since we're talking about coordination, there's also the actual state at the remote vs. my view of the remote vs. my teammates' views of the remote. But we don't think about this too much, because we can synchronize easily as long as the remote branch has a name. Taking the name off the branch makes it more difficult to do anything with someone else's work other than merge it, e.g. pass a changeset back and forth or hand over a half-complete task.
> why do we also use the command `git stash`, instead of just always creating a new branch for our temporary work?
I have no idea actually, because I don't. I haven't run git stash manually since I learned about autostash, and even before that it wasn't for temporary work but for changes I decided I wanted somewhere else only after writing them. Temporary work mostly does get a branch (usually as a new commit on top of my current local branch).
> If I'm understanding correctly, every time you rebase the longest branch, for each commit in the branch, you would manually run e.g. `git push <commit> origin:my-branch-name`?
Close, except I'd scroll down the list of commits and type `P o RET TAB branch-name` (or something to that effect, it'd be slightly different if I have several remotes). This would take perhaps ~0.5 seconds per branch and not require me to context switch to a terminal.
It does take longer for people using less powerful clients, but virtually all do provide some way to do it even it means a few right-clicks on a menu and clicking some "OK" buttons, and there's value in everyone using analogous operations. And the people using those clients usually can't reliably recover from a large class of "git broke" mistakes, assistance from git-branchless or not, so handing them a CLI and a prayer is out of the question. And even the "long version" is pretty negligible (like, maybe 10 seconds per branch?) compared to everything else you should do to make your changeset approachable for review.
Magit, and the remote branch names are visible in the log view and easy to enter via tab completion. (We're still talking about stacked PRs right? Median stacked at any given time is probably 2 and p90 is maybe 4? Max I've ever seen is ~10 and that was quite a fucked up situation for plenty of other reasons.)
10 seconds would certainly be too long for me. It is obviously not too long for them, or they'd learn some keyboard shortcuts to get the easy 5 out of the way to begin with. But regardless, it's all pretty much dwarfed by things that need actual brainpower like re-reading my commit messages for grammatical errors / broken links / etc.
I see, thanks for the information. I often stack 10+ commits, so I don't think your workflow would be reasonable for me. (For example, here, I have 11 finished commits and 3 in progress: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/pull/451 — but I don't actually use stacked PRs on Github, particularly if no one is reviewing my code. Most of my stacking is at work with Phabricator anyways, which handles this better.)
It’s only necessary to push ten branches, one per commit, if you intend ten separate, let’s say, “review events” though. For that example we would have fewer than that nor would we want that many.
I do stack 10+ commits fairly regularly but that may be only 1-2 reviews.
(I’m not familiar with Phabricator, only Gerrit and GH/GL, as well as some more manual Workflows.)
Right, in this case, I would prefer 10 separate review events. Other than for code review purposes themselves, I would want CI to run on each of these commits individually, rather than only on the result at the end.
You can click on individual commits in a pull request on GH (and in every single git tool I know) to review each commit individually. A pull request is an abstraction over a set of commits. Sometimes it's 1:1, many times it's not. Some large companies force the issue because even though it is more rigamarole for everyone involved, they can afford it. So then people invent silly scripts and coin entire workflows just so they can "push 10 PRs all at once" because they want the efficiency back that a 1:1 commit to PR policy robbed from them. It's all quite silly. FYI many CI systems support running each commit individually, including GH and GitLab.
I (and many developers I know) would use the GitHub individual commit review system, but it has a lot of missing features which make it unreasonable to update commits in the PR. For example, if you rewrite one of the commits in a multi-commit PR, then GitHub loses the association and old comments are lost. Similarly, you can't view the diff between an old and new version of a commit.
As far as I know, Phabricator does not let you view or comment on individual commits in a code review (which I use at work). Let me know if you know differently and I might switch to doing that.
Can you advise me on running CI on each commit in the PR in GitHub? As far as I can see, it's technically possible in that you can run arbitrary code as part of your CI, but there's no convenient way to do it. (In particular, I would want to be able to view the CI runs for each individual commit, i.e. render the little checkmark/x next to each commit in GitHub, which seems like it would require a lot of integration via the API.)
One thing that often happens in a stack is the earlier commits are regularly merged into the main branch while the later commits await review. This helps to keep things in sync in a trunk-based development workflow. Is there a way to split out and merge only the earliest (reviewed and accepted) commits, and leave the later commits pending review, in a tool like GitHub?
Overall, I would like to be able to use GitHub PRs for big stacks, but there seems to be a lot of friction in doing so, to the point where it's more convenient to adopt an alternate code review tool (like Graphite) or PR management tool.
> As far as I know, Phabricator does not let you view or comment on individual commits in a code review (which I use at work). Let me know if you know differently and I might switch to doing that.
Isn't there a "commits" tab when viewing a revision? Also Phabricator is no longer maintained for the last year.
> Can you advise me on running CI on each commit in the PR in GitHub? As far as I can see, it's technically possible in that you can run arbitrary code as part of your CI, but there's no convenient way to do it. (In particular, I would want to be able to view the CI runs for each individual commit, i.e. render the little checkmark/x next to each commit in GitHub, which seems like it would require a lot of integration via the API.)
However, before you do that, consider: this one I think is a slight impedance mismatch between how users conceptually think about using GH and how GH actions are designed to be triggered. The most simple thing to do if you want every commit checked and tested is just make a GH action that runs your checks on push, which gets run on every commit and updates the status. If you already have a push action, just remove the "main" branch restriction. The PR action is designed to do PR-scoped things. You can, if you really only want to check commits once they are opened for PR, iterate over the commit list and manually trigger workflows to test and check each one (you can even just manually trigger your existing push action if you add the manual trigger option and specify the commit sha yourself and it will run, I think). But, is the list of commits that get pushed to the repo and the list of commits you want to eventually test for inclusion into main really that different, at the end of the day?
Please take a moment to remind yourself that different people are in different situations and have different social and technical constraints influencing their decisionmaking, and that people can come to different conclusions from your own for reasons other than incompetence and ignorance. I am sure you are a very smart and effective person, but that doesn't mean that you know what is best for every person in every situation.
That is, in fact, my whole point. There are multiple ways to use your tools--don't assume that people who prefer to use things a different way are ignorant. We completely agree. My challenge is to the frequency at which there is actual need to limit the allowed workflows as a result of different preferences. In other words, let there be a diversity of workflows and deal with it.
More often than not I've seen such limits used to "reign in" "misbehaving" engineers or because, as I've suggested, people sometimes don't know how to use a tool to its full capacity. Sometimes it's purely people wanting to force their preference on others. I've had to walk senior engineers through (or just manually clean up when they clearly have no idea how git works) branches that people royally mess up because they merged something in 8 different ways because some other person told them rewriting history is evil or some previous organization taught them to only push merge commits to PRs or protected all branches or something...
There can both be organizations that need to enforce policy to make their business successful and people that don't really understand the full gamut of what's possible with a tool and restrict workflows to stuff they understand. I don't think I equivocated the two. I simply expressed frustration from all the times I've anecdotally encountered people to aren't fluent with git making decisions for others who are fluent with git on how git should be applied.
In particular, since this is the one I see usually called out as a benefit of branchless:
Stock Git does not have good ways of rebasing a sequence of branches.
A sequence of branches can be rebased by rebasing (or otherwise rewriting) the longest one (the only one you'll need locally) then pushing the individual commits in the current branch to the remote under any relevant branch names. This doesn't take zero time, but with good git UIs it will take less time than remembering `git move`, and it's not especially hard to do with the stock CLI either.