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programmer_humor

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fubarx , in Life Hack

Little Bobby Tables says hi.

bobbytables ,

Hi!

MadMadBunny ,

Whaaaaaaaat!?!?

Gabu ,

Oh no! He’s arrived

LordTrychon ,

You’re not so little anymore!

mr_satan , in Three monitors, and i feel insulted
@mr_satan@monyet.cc avatar

Monitors – hell yes! RGB – can’t stand it. My keyborad has a plain white backlight and that’s it. It’s purely functional.

Mesa ,
@Mesa@programming.dev avatar

Could one argue that your conscious choice to not pick an RGB backlit keyboard is in part because of your aversion to it, therefore making it somewhat of an aesthe-

RGB == FPS bro

cyborganism , (edited ) in Rebase Supremacy

I prefer to rebase as well. But when you’re working with a team of amateurs who don’t know how to use a VCS properly and never update their branc with the parent branch, you end up with lots of conflicts.

I find that for managing conflicts, rebase is very difficult as you have to resolve conflicts for every commit. You can either use rerere to repeat the conflict resolution automatically, or you can squash everything. But when you’re dealing with a team of Git-illiterate developers (which is VERY often the case) you can either spend the time to educate them and still risk having problems because they don’t give a shit, or you can just do a regular merge and go on with your life.

Those are my two cents, speaking from experience.

technom ,

I agree that merge is the easier strategy with amateurs. By amateurs I mean those who cannot be bothered to learn about rebase. But what you really lose there is a nice commit history. It’s good to have, even if your primary strategy is merging. And people tend to create horrendous commit histories when they don’t know how to edit them.

agressivelyPassive ,

Honestly, I’m pretty sure 99.9% of git users never really bother with the git history in any way that would be hindered by merging.

Git has a ton of powerful features, but for most projects they don’t matter at all. You want a distributed consensus, that’s it. Bothering yourself with all those advanced features and trying to learn some esoteric commands is frankly just overhead. Yes, you can solve great problems with them, but these problems almost never occur, and if they do, using the stupid tools is faster overall.

aniki ,

We use history and blame a lot

chamomile ,
@chamomile@furry.engineer avatar

@agressivelyPassive @technom That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, IMO. Well-structured commit histories with clear descriptions can be a godsend for spelunking through old code and trying to work out why a change was made. That is the actual point, after all - the Linux kernel project, which is what git was originally built to manage, is fastidious about this. Most projects don't need that level of hygiene, but they can still benefit from taking lessons from it.

To that end, sure, git can be arcane at the best of times and a lot of the tools aren't strictly necessary, but they're very useful for managing that history.

zalgotext ,

Yup, once you can use git with good hygiene, it opens up the door to add in other tools like commitizen and semantic-release, which completely automates things like version number bumps and changelog generation.

xigoi ,
@xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I fucking hate auto-generated changelogs, so I consider that a downside.

agressivelyPassive ,

I’d still argue, that the overhead is not worth it most of the time.

Linux is one of the largest single pieces of software in existence, of course it has different needs than the standard business crap the vast majority of us develop.

To keep your analogy: not every room is an operating room, you might have some theoretical advantages from keeping your kitchen as clean as an OR, but it’s probably not worth the hassle.

zalgotext ,

To keep your analogy, most people’s git histories, when using a merge-based workflow, is the equivalent of never cleaning the kitchen, ever.

agressivelyPassive ,

No, it’s not. And you know that.

Seriously, ask yourself, how often did the need arise to look into old commits and if it did, wasn’t the underlying issue caused by the processes around it? I’ve been in the industry for a few years now and I can literally count on one hand how often I had to actually look at commit history for more than maybe 10 commits back. And I spend maybe 10min per year on that on average, if at all.

I honestly don’t see a use case that would justify the overhead. It’s always just “but what if X, then you’d save hours!” But X never happens or X is caused by a fucked up process somewhere else and git is just the hammer to nail down every problem.

zalgotext ,

Seriously, ask yourself, how often did the need arise to look into old commits

Literally every single day. I have a git alias that prints out the commit graph for my repositories, and by looking at that I can instantly see what tasks my coworkers are working on, what their progress is, and what their work is based on. It’s way more useful than any stand-up meeting I’ve ever attended.

I’ve been in the industry for a few years now and I can literally count on one hand how often I had to actually look at commit history for more than maybe 10 commits back.

I’ve been in the industry for nearly 15 years, but I can say that the last 3 years have been my most productive, and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that I’m on a team that cares about git history, knows how to use it, and keeps it readable. Like other people have been saying, this is a self fulfilling prophecy - most people don’t care to keep their git history readable, so they’ve only ever seen unreadable git histories, and so they think git history is useless.

I honestly don’t see a use case that would justify the overhead.

What overhead? The learning curve on rebasing isn’t that much steeper than that of merging or just using git itself. Take an hour to read the git docs, watch a tutorial or two, and you’re good to go. Understand that people actually read your commit messages and take 15 extra seconds to make them actually useful. Take an extra minute before opening an MR to rebase your personal branches interactively and squash down the “fixed a typo” and “ran isort” commits into something that’s actually useful. In the long run this saves time by making your code more easily reviewable, and giving reviewers useful context around your changes.

It’s always just “but what if X, then you’d save hours!” But X never happens or X is caused by a fucked up process somewhere else and git is just the hammer to nail down every problem.

No, having a clean, readable git history literally saves my team hours. I haven’t had to manually write or edit a changelog in three years because we generate it automatically from our commit messages. I haven’t had to think about a version number in three years because they’re automatically calculated from our commit messages. Those are the types of things teams sink weeks into, time absolutely wasted spent arguing over whether this thing or that is a patch bump or a minor bump, and no one can say for sure without looking at diffs or spinning up multiple versions of the code and poking it manually, because the git log is a tangled mess of spaghetti with meatballs made of messages like “finally fixed the thing” and “please just work dammit”. My team can tell you those things instantly just by looking at the git log. Because we care about history, and we keep it clean and useable.

thanks_shakey_snake ,

I gotta say, I was with you for most of this thread, but looking through old commits is definitely something that I do on a regular basis… Like not even just because of problems, but because that’s part of how I figure out what’s going on.

The whole reason I keep my git history clean and my commit messages thoughtful is so that future-me (or future-someone-else) will have an easier time walking through it later, because that happens all the time.

I’ll still almost always choose merge instead of rebase, but not because I don’t care about the git history-- quite the opposite, it’s really important to me in a very practical way.

chamomile ,
@chamomile@furry.engineer avatar

@agressivelyPassive You should still clean your kitchen though, that's my point.

agressivelyPassive ,

Did I say anything otherwise?

technom ,

Only users who don’t know rebasing and the advantages of a crafted history make statements like this. There are several projects that depend on clean commit history. You need it for conventional commit tools (like commitzen), pre-commit hook tools, git blame, git bisect, etc.

agressivelyPassive ,

Uuuh, am I no true Scotsman?

Counter argument: why do you keep fucking up so bad you need these tools? Only users who are bad at programming need these. Makes about as much sense as your accusation.

You keep iterating the same arguments as the rest here, and I still adhere to my statement above: hardly anybody needs those tools. I literally never used pre-commit hooks or bisect in any semi-professional context. And I don’t know a single project that uses them. And before you counter with another “well u stoopid then” comment: the projects I’ve been working on were with pretty reputable companies and handled literally billions of Euros every year. I can honestly say, that pretty much everyone living in Germany had his/her data pushed through code that I wrote.

technom ,

Uuuh, am I no true Scotsman?

That’s a terrible and disingenuous take. I’m saying that you won’t understand why it’s useful till you’ve used it. Spinning that as no true Scotsman fallacy is just indicative of that ignorance.

You keep iterating the same arguments as the rest here, and I still adhere to my statement above: hardly anybody needs those tools.

And you keep repeating that falsehood. Isn’t that the real no true Scotsman fallacy? How do you even pretend to know that nobody needs it? You can’t talk for everyone else. Those who use it find it useful in several other ways that I and others have explained. You can’t just judge it away from your position of ignorance.

xigoi ,
@xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Why would you want to edit your commit history? When I need to look at it for some reason, I want to see what actually happened, not a fictional story.

technom ,

You can have both. I’ll get to that later. But first, let me explain why edited history is useful.

Unedited histories are very chaotic and often contains errors, commits with partial features, abandoned code, reverted code, out-of-sequence code, etc. These are useful in preserving the actual progress of your own thought. But such histories are a nightmare to review. Commits should be complete (a single commit contains a full feature) and in proper order. If you’re a reviewer, you also wouldn’t want to waste time reviewing someone else’s mistakes, experiments, reverted code, etc. Self-complete commits also have another advantage - users can choose to omit an entire feature by omitting a commit.

Now the part about having both - the unedited and carefully crafted history. Rebasing doesn’t erase the original branch. You can preserve it by creating a new branch. Or, you can recover it from reflog. I use it to preserve the original development history. Then I submit the edited/crafted history/branch upstream.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Because when debugging, you typically don’t care about the details of wip, some more stuff, Merge remote-tracking branch ‘origin/master’, almost working, Merge remote-tracking branch ‘origin/master’, fix some tests etc. and would rather follow logical steps being taken in order with descriptive messages such as component: refactor xyz in preparation for feature, component: add do_foo(), component: implement feature using do_foo() etc.

magic_lobster_party ,

How others are keeping their branches up to date is their problem. If you use Gitlab you can set up squash policy for merge requests. All the abomination they’ve caused in their branch will turn into one nice commit to the main branch.

trxxruraxvr ,

In a small team at a small company it becomes my problem pretty quickly, since I’m the only one that actually has some clue about what git does.

cyborganism ,

This. When they get any sort of conflicts in their pull request, it becomes MY problem because they don’t know what to do.

zalgotext ,

Heaven forbid my teammates read any documentation or make any attempt to understand the tooling necessary to do their job.

That being said, I taught my dumbass git-illiterate team members a rebase workflow, with the help of the git UI in Pycharm. Haven’t had any issues with merge conflicts yet, but that might just be because they’re too scared to ask me for help any more

expr ,

I don’t want squashed commits. It makes git tools worse (git bisect, git cherry-pick, etc.) and I work very hard to craft a meaningful set of commits for my work and I don’t want to throw all of that away.

But yeah, I don’t actually give a shit what they are doing on their branches. I regularly rebase onto master anyway.

RustyShackleford ,
@RustyShackleford@programming.dev avatar

Git-illeterate illiterate

cyborganism ,

Ah thanks.

northendtrooper , in Life Hack

Can’t they trace it back to you since you’re using a card to get that prompt?

survivalmachine ,

In my country, we can buy pre-paid credit cards in the supermarket using cash. I guess that is still traceable using supermarket security cameras and facial recognition, but if you’re attempting this, I’d make it as difficult as possible.

SnipingNinja ,

You just have to buy a prepaid card through another third party

Stoney_Logica1 ,

Prepaid VISA gift card purchased with cash.

TexasDrunk ,

Are there still places you can buy those that you wouldn’t be on camera and immediately trackable?

I’m not shitting on the idea, I’m just trying to make it as good as possible.

dbx12 ,

Masks don’t only protect from airborne viruses…

Stoney_Logica1 ,

Paired with a hat or hoodie with IR LEDs.

ProgrammingSocks ,

This isn’t even remotely viable. There’s so much isolation and “cloud” shit that it wasn’t viable from the start. It’s just a joke.

psud ,

Maybe. If they can identify which record was the last one changed and the last one changed its directly related to the one that made the change and the ended transaction statement successfully posted a transaction

If the SQL injection crashed that person’s transaction there’s little chance of finding the culprit

Coasting0942 , in Life Hack

Jokes on you. Restaurant owner too rich, behavior is within normal range for IRS AI.

Though the AI is interested on how your bank account is higher than it’s supposed to be.

itsnotits ,

Joke’s* on you

(Short for “The joke is on you”.)

Klear ,

Thank’s.

small_crow ,
@small_crow@lemmy.ca avatar

No, jokes. It’s plural because there are many jokes on you.

sirleonelle , in Rebase Supremacy

I’ll go one further: use git rebase --interactive

natecox ,
@natecox@programming.dev avatar

I remember learning about how to use this back in the day and what a game changer it was for my workflow.

Today I like to do all of the commits as I’m working. Maybe dozens or more as I chug along, marking off waypoints rather than logging actual changes. When I’m done a quick interactive rebase cleans up the history to meaningful commits quite nicely.

The fun part is that I will work with people sometimes who both swear that “rewriting history” is evil and should never be done, but also tell me how useful my commit logs are and want to know how I take such good notes as I go.

magic_lobster_party ,

At my company we just use a squash policy in gitlab. Every merge request becomes a single commit to the main branch. Super easy to read the commit log because all commits are descriptive instead of a bunch of “fix MR comments” or “fix pipeline errors”.

Another advice: git reset [commit-id] followed with a git commit -a is a quick way to squash all your commits.

bort ,

Another advice …quick way to squash all your commits

in your IDE select the commits you want to squash. Then rightclick. Then “squash”. All done.

thesmokingman ,

I am still mystified by IDE VCS tools. It’s usually faster for me to do a quick CLI shuffle than use the IDE.

bort ,

I use like 3 of the git-feature from intellij (out of 100 or so). But these 3 features save me a lot of time.

(the other 2 being the 3-way-merge-view and the commit-view where I can select changes for staging)

swordsmanluke ,

Argh. I hate that argument.

Yes - “Rewriting history” is a Bad Thing - but o argue that’s only on ‘main’ (or other shared branches). You should (IMHO) absolutely rewrite your local history pre-push for exactly the reasons you state.

If you rewrite main’s history and force your changes everybody else is gonna have conflicts. Also - history is important for certain debugging and investigation. Don’t be that guy.

Before you push though… rebasing your work to be easily digestible and have a single(ish) focus per commit is so helpful.

  • review is easier since concerns aren’t mixed
  • If a commit needs to be reverted it limits the collateral damage
  • history is easier to follow because the commits tell a story

I use a stacked commit tool to help automate rebasing on upstream commits, but you can do it all with git pretty easily.

Anyway. Good on you; Keep the faith; etc etc. :)

thesmokingman ,

The only other time rewriting history might be bad is when you’re working on a shared branch, which is the point of not rewriting main. If you are working solo on a branch, its history is only what you merge into main so it doesn’t fucking matter at all. If you’re not working solo, maybe you need to adopt a similar process or look at how you’re not working solo. The only time I touch another dev’s branch is at the PR stage and only for quick corrections or missing knowledge so it doesn’t matter if they rebased before or honestly rebase after before the final merge.

sping ,

Even better, master creating fixup and squash commits and maintain logical commits as you work with git rebase -i --autosquash

dejected_warp_core ,

This is really the only sane way to do it. I have run into some wonkyness with the commit history of the target branch commits not resembling git log, but that’s usually for commits outside of what I’m trying to merge.

Edit: squashing commits down this way also helps reduce problems with replaying commit history on the actual rebase. In most cases you don’t need all your “microcommits” in the history, and fewer commits just takes less time to reconcile.

RavenFellBlade , (edited ) in Life Hack
@RavenFellBlade@startrek.website avatar

I’d love to know what this would actually do.

Edit: Thanks for the responses and lively discussion!!

BombOmOm ,
@BombOmOm@lemmy.world avatar

Assuming the accounting system this thing links with both does not protect from SQL injection attacks (many don’t, despite it being easy to protect against) and also has a table named “Bills” with a field named “amount”; what this would do is go through every single Bills record and half the value in the amount field. This would completely fuck the system, particularly when it came to billing and tax filing as the numbers for accounts billing and receivable wouldn’t even come close to matching each other. The accounting department would have a hell of a time fixing the damage.

not_that_guy05 ,

EOM recon will be a bitch.

Aquila ,

Need to throw a rand() in there to make it less easy to unfuck

Gork ,

In the amount/2 term?

Mic_Check_One_Two ,

Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

proper ,
@proper@lemmy.world avatar

Satan?

Buddahriffic ,

Also, by dividing by a number between 0 and 1, you increase the amount it looks like it billed. So income will look like it’s higher than outgoing funds, which will raise suspicions of embezzlement. And if someone actually is embezzling, whatever accounting tricks they’ve been using to hide it might just stop working because everything might need to be examined with a fine tooth comb. “Oh, the billing numbers aren’t right, and also it turns out the invoice numbers aren’t right either. Billing issue was tracked to a hack, but what’s going on with these invoices?”

affiliate ,

if you’re trying to be malicious, wouldn’t it be better to multiply by Rand() instead of divide by Rand()?

assuming there are a decent number of recorded sales, you’d end up seeing many of the calls to Rand() returning values very close to 0. so, if you’re dividing by those values, you’d end see lots of sales records reporting values in the thousands, millions, or even billions of dollars. i feel like that screams “software bug” more than anything. on the other hand, seeing lots of values multiplied by values close to 0 would certainly look weird, but it wouldn’t be as immediately suspicious.

(of course a better thing would just be to use Rand() on a range other than [0,1])

lightnsfw ,

Couldn’t they just *2 all the bills from before this was ran and straighten it out?

dfc09 ,

I imagine they could if they knew exactly what you did and when, but if it doesn’t get discovered until later and nobody knows what happened, it would probably be a bitch to figure out

T156 ,

It seems like it would be fairly easy to find. All you need to do is find out where the price drops massively, and work backwards from there, since it doesn’t change the code going forward.

SchmidtGenetics ,

Pretty sure it would be obvious to anyone working there that chicken tenders are $10 not $5. Even a quick glance at any single bill would show the issue.

DrJenkem ,
@DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube avatar

No it would change the value of all past bills, future bills would still be correct.

SchmidtGenetics ,

And anyone who looks at a past bill would see half price tenders.

DrJenkem ,
@DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube avatar

No. The bill given to the customer would still show the correct amount.

And if anyone looked at previous bills from the backend, they would see normally priced chicken tenders. The total for the bill would be wrong though.

SchmidtGenetics ,

Bill

2x orders chicken tenders $10 =20

Bill total $10 - 20/2 = 10…

Huh… I wonder what the issue is……

DrJenkem ,
@DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube avatar

Yeah, obviously the issue can be discovered. My point is that it’s not going to be immediately discovered by the cashier or a customer. It’ll probably not get discovered until the accountant comes by and notices the discrepancy.

dan , (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

does not protect from SQL injection attacks (many don’t, despite it being easy to protect against)

Every modern database library automatically protects against SQL injection, usually by using prepared statements (where the query with placeholders, and the placeholder values, are sent as two separate things). so a system would have to be written extremely poorly to be vulnerable to it.

This post is just a joke as developers should hopefully be aware of the OWASP top 10 security vulnerabilities.

Edit: Bad developers will do bad things, but any reasonable developer should be well aware of these risks.

r00ty Admin ,
r00ty avatar

Well no. If the programmer uses prepared statements, they are protected. If they use a prepared statement but actually just put their own unsanitized statement in there and execute it, it's not protected.

Now, I'd like to say it is 2024 and everyone should be using AT LEAST prepared statements for security. I've seen people doing some scary things in my time, and that includes quite recently.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Bad developers will do bad things, but most DB framework documentation points people towards the right way to do things, which is why I said it’s not common any more.

DrJenkem ,
@DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube avatar

Bad developers are common though. And good documentation won’t stop a bad developer from doing a bad thing.

I agree that SQLi isn’t as common as it once was, but it still very much exists.

trxxruraxvr ,

Every modern database library automatically protects against SQL injection,

No. Every modern library allows using prepared statements, but very few (of any) force using them. If the developer doesn’t use them the libraries won’t do shit to protect you.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

What I meant is that not many people write raw SQL in product code any more, other than for analytical purposes (which are often in a system like Apache Airflow rather than in product code). ORM systems have mostly taken over except for cases where you really need raw SQL for whatever reason.

psud ,

Practically every dev learnt SQL and it’s really easy to put hands crafted SQL in code so it’s an easy mistake to make

ricecake ,

Oh sweet summer child.

First, injection attacks are third on the owasp list, although they do roll xss into it too, which changed the name, since “shit sanitization on input” and “shit escaping before use” are the cause of both.
owasp.org/Top10/A03_2021-Injection/

Secondly, SQL injection is freakishly common and easy. I don’t know of any database libraries that prevent you from directly executing an SQL literal, they just encourage parameterized statements.

I have personally run into plenty of systems where people build SQL via string concatenation because for whatever reason they can’t use an orm or “proper” SQL generator.

You can find them in the wild fairly often by just tossing ’ or 1=1;– into fields in forms. If it gets mad in a way that doesn’t make sense or suddenly takes forever, you win!

Don’t do that though, because it’s illegal.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Secondly, SQL injection is freakishly common and easy.

Do you have any recent examples of major SQL injection holes?

DrJenkem ,
@DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube avatar

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=sql+injection

And without giving away specifics, I’ve personally found SQLi vulns in the wild within the last 5ish years.

ricecake , (edited )

securityweek.com/millions-of-user-records-stolen-…

darkreading.com/…/critical-security-flaw-wordpres…

tenable.com/…/cve-2023-48788-critical-fortinet-fo…

www.cisa.gov/news-events/…/aa23-158a

nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Advanc…

You can fiddle with the nvd search settings to find whatever severity score you like, or filter by execution parameters.

nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-1597

That one was a treat when I check under critical, since it’s an injection attack that can bypass parameterized query protections for the database driver, which is why “defense in depth” and “always sanitize your fucking inputs” are such key things to remember.

I hope that provided what you’re looking for, and maybe increases your awareness of SQL injection. 😊

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Great comment. Thanks!

Kerb , (edited )
@Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

its an sql injection attack.
its rather unlikely that it works in a modern app.

assuming this would work,
it injects a command in the sql database.

it is assumed that the app runs a sql querry with the input field as a parameter e.g.
INSERT INTO “bills” (item, ammount, tip) VALUES (“steak”, “20,00 $”, “content of the custom tip goes here”);

the semicolon indicates the end of the querry,
so the the text would cause the app to run an unfinished querry, and then start a new querry that messes up the content of the bills table.

some_guy ,

Further: xkcd.com/327

RavenFellBlade ,
@RavenFellBlade@startrek.website avatar

Is that Bobby?

diffcalculus ,

Nothing. For one, it won’t let you enter letters. Two, the table structure to these POS systems are more nuanced than a simple bills table with am amounts field.

It’s amusing and all, but it’s not something you can do.

Source: work with, and develop around, these types of POS systems.

nullPointer , in Rebase Supremacy

do it often. you may end up with 150 conflicts to have to wade through.

13 , in Rebase Supremacy
@13@kbin.run avatar

Imagine rewring history

wise_pancake ,

History is written by the squashers.

magic_lobster_party ,

Imagine working with a tangled spaghetti of history

victorz ,

You don’t? Just follow the merges.

muad_dibber ,
@muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml avatar

You try to pull someone’s changes, but whoops, they used rebase and rewrote history! Delete the branch and start over.

thesmokingman ,

No you just do a rebase to bring it in. Assuming you’re making atomic commits you shouldn’t have a ton of merge conflicts. If you have to do this a lot, your branch scope is really bad and the problem isn’t in how you’re using got, it’s in how you’re slicing work.

muad_dibber ,
@muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml avatar

If you try to pull someone else’s rebased / history rewritten branch, your git will tell you that it’s rejected. You can completely avoid this by merging instead of rewriting history.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

…or you simply rebase the subset of commits of your branch onto the rewritten branch. That’s like 10 simple button presses in magit.

expr ,

2 things:

  1. You don’t pull rebased work pretty much ever. Rebasing is for feature branches by a single author to craft a high quality history, generally. It’s much, much better than littering your branch with merge commits from upstream.
  2. If for some reason you do need to pull rebased changes, you simply do git pull --rebase. Works without issue.
Crow , in Rebase Supremacy

I’ve been using merge, and I hate that I don’t even know what rebase really does

BlackPenguins ,

Merge is taking all the code from the master branch and combining it with the task branch, resulting in a commit for just the merge itself.

Rebase is “re-basing” where your task branch was created from off the master branch. It essentially takes all the commits from master that happened since you branched, REWRITES THE HISTORY of your task branch by inserting those master branch commits before all your existing commits, and effectively makes your task branch look like it was branched yesterday instead of like 4 weeks ago. You changed where your task branch originated on the master. You moved its base.

Atlassian does a fantastic writeup on this.

Crow ,

So, with a merge you basically shuffle in the changes from both branches, but a rebase takes only the changes from one branch and puts it over the other? Edit: no. Read wrong. I should probably watch a vid about it or something

BlackPenguins ,

It inserts the master changes before the task branch ones.

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

So kinda like as if you had kept your branch synced the whole time?

BlackPenguins , (edited )

Kind of. Both merge and rebase result in the branches “synced up” but they do it in different ways.

Merge is making a batter for cookies, having a bowl for dry ingredients (task branch) and a bowl for wet ingredients, (master branch) making them separately and then just dumping the dry bowl into the wet bowl (merge).

Rebase is taking a time machine back to before you started mixing the dry ingredients, mix all the wet ingredients first then add the dry ones on top of that in the same bowl.

It’s really hard to create an analogy for this.

andrew , (edited )
@andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun avatar

Merge takes two commits and smooshes them together at their current state, and may require one commit to reconcile changes. Rebase takes a whole branch and moves it, as if you started working on it from a more recent base commit, and will ask you to reconcile changes as it replays history.

https://lemmy.stuart.fun/pictrs/image/2b06417c-740b-4d6f-a258-76c75a63c500.jpeg

Crow ,

That’s pretty cool, might actually do that. Tho, we currently don’t use the history as much anyways, we’re just having a couple of small student projects with the biggest group being 6 people. I guess it’s more useful if you’re actually making a real product in a huge project that has a large team behind it

RecluseRamble ,

Just remember to not combine it with force push or you’re in for some chaos (rewriting history team members have already fetched is a big no-no).

Transtronaut ,

Facts. Force push belongs in Star Wars, and nowhere else.

expr , (edited )

Or, you know, on your own feature branch to clean up your own commits. It’s much, much better than constantly littering your branch’s history with useless merge commits from upstream, and it lets you craft a high-quality, logical commit history.

RecluseRamble ,

Of course it has its uses. I didn’t mention them because the guy just learned about rebase - it’s unlikely to be applied flawlessly from the start.

expr ,

I was replying to the other comment, not yours. Though there’s not really a way of using rebasing without force pushing unless it’s a no-op.

Rebasing is really not a big deal. It’s not actually hard to go back to where you were, especially if you’re using git rebase --interactive. For whatever reason people don’t seem to get that commits aren’t actually ever lost and it’s not that hard to point HEAD back to some previous commit.

RecluseRamble ,

I was replying to the other comment, not yours.

I know. Answered anyway because I thought of the same thing as you.

Though there’s not really a way of using rebasing without force pushing unless it’s a no-op.

I like to rebase after fetching and before pushing. IMO that’s the most sensible way to use it even in teams that generally prefer merge. It’s also not obvious to beginners since pull is defaulted to fetch+merge.

expr ,

Ah gotcha.

like to rebase after fetching and before pushing. IMO that’s the most sensible way to use it even in teams that generally prefer merge.

What do you mean? Like not pushing at all until you’re making the MR? Because if the branch has ever been pushed before and you rebase, you’re gonna need to force push the branch to update it.

Personally I’m constantly rebasing (like many times a day) because I maintain a clean commit history as I develop (small changes to things I did previously get commits and are added to the relevant commit as a fixup during interactive rebasing). I also generally keep a draft MR up with my most recent work (pushing at end of day) so that I can have colleagues take a look at any point if I want to validate anything about the direction I’m taking before continuing further (and so CI can produce various artifacts for me).

It’s also not obvious to beginners since pull is defaulted to fetch+merge.

Yeah, pull should definitely be –ff-only by default and it’s very unfortunate it isn’t. Merging on pull is kind of insane behavior that no one actually wants.

RecluseRamble ,

What do you mean? Like not pushing at all until you’re making the MR? Because if the branch has ever been pushed before and you rebase, you’re gonna need to force push the branch to update it.

Not everyone works in large orgs that require pull requests. We have a dev branch multiple devs push to and just branch off for test phase. So I commit locally (also interactive rebasing when fixing stuff from earlier). When I’m ready to push, I fetch, rebase and push. I never force push here.

expr ,

Uh, it’s definitely a bad idea to be concurrently developing on the same branch for a lot of reasons, large org or not. That’s widely considered a bad practice and is just a recipe for trouble. My org isn’t that huge, and on our team for our repo we have 9 developers working on it including myself. We still do MRs because that’s the industry standard best practice and sidesteps a lot of issues.

Like, how do you even do reviews? Patch files?

Transtronaut ,

You can do all that without force push. Just make a new branch and do the cleanup before the first push there. Allowing force push just invites disaster from junior developers who don’t know what they’re doing. If you want to clean up after them, that’s your business, I guess.

expr ,

That’s exactly the same thing. A branch is nothing more than a commit that you’ve given a name to. Whether that name is your original branch’s name or a new branch’s name is irrelevant. The commit would be the same either way.

A junior cannot actually do any real damage or cause any actual issue. Even if they force push “over” previous work (which again, is just pointing their branch to a new commit that doesn’t include the previous work), that work is not lost and it’s trivial to point their branch to the good commit they had previously. It’s also a good learning opportunity. The only time you actually can lose work is if you throw away uncommitted changes, but force pushing or not is completely irrelevant for that.

zalgotext ,

Force pushes are perfectly safe if you’re working on your own branch, and even if you’re sharing a branch, you can still force push to it as long as you inform and coordinate with whoever else is working on that branch.

ScreaminOctopus ,

I wouldn’t recommend it. The Git documentation itself doesn’t recommend rebase for more than moving a few unpushed commits to the front of a branch you are updating. Using it by default instead of merge requires you to use --force-push as part of your workflow which can lead to confusing situations when multiple developers end up commiting to the same branch, and at worst can lead to catastrophic data loss. The only benefit is a cleaner history graph, which is rarely used anyway, and you can always make the history graph easier to read with a gui without incuring any of the problems of rebase.

surge_1 ,

Bad take IMO,

At 10+ YOE, I use rebase almost exclusively. Branch from main, rebase to clean up commit history before putting up a PR. If commits are curated properly you don’t run into conflicts very often. Branches really shouldn’t be shared too often anyway, and the ones that are should be write protected.

Catastrophic data loss isn’t really possible either with git since it’s all preserved and you can git reflog even if you mess up.

The meme is right. Git good

agressivelyPassive ,

Years of experience don’t really matter here, that’s just call to authority, in this case yourself. You might as well be the worst git user ever after 20 years of usage, or the best after 2. We don’t know that.

Anyway, what you’re saying basically requires a perfect world to be true. Feature branch flow is perfectly fine, but you do end up with merge conflicts constantly, unless you have cordoned off areas of the repo for certain users. Two people working on unrelated features, both change a signature of some helper/util method, merge conflict. Nothing serious, can be fixed in a minute, and rebasing or merging won’t help for either.

Merge is perfectly fine. And arguing about which strategy to use is one of those autistic debates we as an industry seemingly love to have. It doesn’t matter, but you’ll find people screaming at each other about it. See Emacs vs. Vi. Same crap.

surge_1 ,

Merge is fine, but not knowing both rebase and merge is dumb. And I guess I’ve been in a perfect world this whole time in huge technical orgs lol.

Croquette ,

When rebasing, it applies the changes without the commit history?

Does that mean that when you fast forward your main/dev branch and commit, you then add a single commit that encompasses every changes that were rebase?

expr ,

No, there are no fast-forwards with rebasing. A rebase will take take the diff of each commit on your feature branch that has diverged from master and apply those each in turn, creating new commits for each one. The end result is that you have a linear history as though you had branched from master and made your commits just now.

If you had branched like this:


<span style="color:#323232;">A -> B -> C (master)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">   
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      -> D (feature)
</span>

It would like this after merging master into your feature branch:


<span style="color:#323232;">A -> B -> C (master) ->   E (feature)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                                      /
</span><span style="color:#323232;">     -> D -------------------> /
</span>

And it would like this if you instead rebased your feature branch onto master:


<span style="color:#323232;">A -> B -> C (master) -> D' (feature)
</span>

This is why it’s called a “rebase”: the current state of master becomes the starting point or “base” for all of your subsequent commits. Assuming no conflicts, the diff between A and D is the same as the diff between A and D’.

expr ,

This a really bad take and fundamentally misunderstands rebasing.

First off, developers should never be committing to the same branch. Each developer maintains their own branch. Work that needs to be tested together before merging to master belongs on a dedicated integration branch that each developer merges their respective features branches into. This is pretty standard stuff.

You don’t use rebasing on shared branches, and no one arguing for rebasing is suggesting you do that. The only exception might be perhaps a dedicated release manager preparing a release or a merge of a long-running shared branch. But that is the kind of thing that’s communicated and coordinated.

Rebasing is for a single developer working on a feature branch to produce a clean history of their own changes. Rebasing in this fashion doesn’t touch any commits other than the author’s. The purpose is to craft a high quality history that walks a reader through a proposed sequence of logical, coherent changes.

Contrary to your claim, a clean history is incredibly valuable. There’s many tools in git that benefit significantly from clean, well-organizes commits. git bisect, git cherry-pick… Pretty much any command that wants to pluck commits from history for some reason. Or even stuff like git log -L or git blame are far more useful when the commit referenced is not some giant amalgamation of changes from all over the place.

When working on a feature branch, if you’re merging upstream into your branch, you’re littering your history with pointless, noisy commits and making your MR harder to review, in addition to making your project’s history harder to understand and navigate.

surge_1 ,

1000 times this

pineapple_pizza ,

This diagram seems wrong to me. Isn’t the second image a squash merge? Also why would rebasing a feature branch change main?

bort ,

why would rebasing a feature branch change main?

the image does not update the feature branch. It merges the featurebranch into main with a regular old merge-commit on the main branch.

andrew ,
@andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun avatar

Yeah, the image (not mine, but the best I found quickly) kinda shows a rebase+merge as the third image. As the other commenter mentioned, the new commit in the second image is the merge commit that would include any conflict resolutions.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

The only difference between a *rebase-merge and a rebase is whether main is reset to it or not. If you kept the main branch label on D and added a feature branch label on G’, that would be what @andrew meant.

xilliah ,

I’m relatively new to git and rebase looks like a mess to me? Like it appears to be making duplicate commits and destroys the proper history?

If you use rebase to get a more readable history, isn’t the issue the tool you use to view the history?

I guess I have to try it out a few times to get it.

agressivelyPassive ,

The commits aren’t duplicated, but applied to the main branch. Since git has commit ids, they won’t be re-rebased either.

Ephera ,

What you probably mean by duplicate commits is that it assigns new commit IDs to commits that have been rebased. If you had already pushed those commits, then git status will tell you that the remote branch and your local branch have diverged by as many commits as you rebased.

Well, and what is the “proper history”? If your answer is “chronological”, then why so?
For the rare times that it matters when exactly a commit was created, they’ve got a timestamp. But otherwise, the “proper history” is whatever you make the proper history. What matters is that the commits can be applied one after another, which a rebase ensures.

When you’re working on a branch and you continuously rebase on the branch you want to eventually merge to, then the merged history will look as if you had checked out the target branch and just made your commits really quickly without anyone else committing anything in between.
And whether you’ve done your commits really quickly or over the course of weeks, that really shouldn’t matter.

What is really cool about (supposedly) making commits really quickly is that your history becomes linear and it tells a comprehensible story. It won’t be all kinds of unrelated changes mixed randomly chronologically, but rather related commits following one another.
And of course, you also lose the merge-commits, which convey no valuable information of their own.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

you also lose the merge-commits, which convey no valuable information of their own.

In a feature branch workflow, I do not agree. The merge commit denotes the end of a feature branch. Without it, you lose all notion of what was and wasn’t part of the same feature branch.

someonesmall ,

Agreed, you also lose the info about the resolved merge conflicts during the merge (which have been crucial a few times to me).

Ephera ,

Well, with a rebase workflow, there should be no merge conflicts during the final merge. That should always be a fast-forward.

Of course, that’s because you shift those merge conflicts to occur earlier, during your regular rebases. But since they’re much smaller conflicts at a time, they’re much easier to resolve correctly, and will often be auto-resolved by Git.

You’re still right, that if you’ve got a long-running feature branch, there’s a chance that a conflict resolution broke a feature that got developed early on, and that does become invisible. On the flip-side, though, the person working on that feature-branch has a chance to catch that breakage early on, before the merge happens.

PP_BOY_ , in Rebase Supremacy
@PP_BOY_@lemmy.world avatar

Why is anyone using X in 2024?

hddsx ,

I do, I have yet to switch to Wayland

CanadaPlus ,

It’s called Twitter now, by conservation of names. /s

milicent_bystandr ,

You didn’t hear of wayland.social?

MNByChoice ,

OFC it’s real wayland.social/explore

Encinos ,

Shit, I unironically thought they were talking about this, and I unironically haven’t switched because Barrier is broken on Wayland

13 ,
@13@kbin.run avatar

I use X because Cinnamon on Wayland has no option to change the keyboard layout

merthyr1831 ,

I tried their experimental Wayland session and it’s still super buggy on high refresh rate/high DPI screens (loads of graphical errors and artifacts) so still a ways to go imo

Theharpyeagle ,

I tried it for a moment, made games stutter like hell, switched back. I know I need to go in and figure it out at some point, but it’s hard to muster the energy when X, for the most part, works fine.

From what I’ve seen, it probably has to do with my Nvidia GPU.

30p87 ,

I’m currently at the point where I blame everything that works on my Laptop but not on my PC on Nvidia, because that’s literally the biggest difference between those two. Like currently my getty isn’t displaying properly, which is surely NVidias fault.

tostiman ,
@tostiman@sh.itjust.works avatar

Odd, when i switched to Wayland the stuttering stopped! Also on Nvidia

merthyr1831 ,

Depends on a few things with your setup: age of your GPU, the resolution/refresh rate of your monitor. I think even the choice of DP/HDMI can have an impact too

KSPAtlas ,
@KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz avatar

On nvidia, it definitely feels much smoother, but some GPU accelerated programs like games become flickery

supercritical ,
@supercritical@lemmy.world avatar

Because my new intel integrated graphics cause Wayland to run like a slideshow.

technom ,

Because their name is Elon Musk.

Jumuta ,

because some of the hardware I use is too old to run Wayland

T156 ,

Wayland really doesn’t like RDP/remote access, so X is the only way to go if you want that to work properly.

AArun ,

I actually never had an issue on my wayland system. I used remmina for rdp but never had an issue.

Zuberi ,
@Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

No censorship tbh

FiniteBanjo ,

But there is blatant censorship

Zuberi ,
@Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Nothing even remotely compared to any of the other platforms mate

FiniteBanjo ,

Platforms of the same nature like Mastodon.social ? Because no.

Actually, internal reports seem to indicate Twitter under Musk complies with much more takedown requests than it did previously, numbers seem to range from 80% to 98%, including requests from countries like China, Ethiopia, Turkey, etc. When people mention censorship by big tech the top three names are Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The only time I know of that twitter fought censorship was when India wanted them to takedown news about farmers’ protests, and Twitter lost in court, probably owing largely to the fact that he cut staff by 80% and ran the company’s finance into the ground by endorsing hate speech.

Zuberi ,
@Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

No, I did not include mastodon in the “other platforms” because 99% of the normies aren’t on decentralized platforms anyway.

Very small pond we’re discussing, as sad as that is.

All I did was answer why THEY think Twitter is worth using. I personally don’t use Twitter, nor do I disagree w/ your take on censorship.

FiniteBanjo ,

Idk I hang out on Mastodon.social

If yall don’t like the chronological feed then find a hashtag you like and start following people.

johannesvanderwhales , in Three monitors, and i feel insulted

The watermark over the watermark on this…for that extra shitposty goodness.

passepartout , in Rebase Supremacy

I like the idea of it and there were times i used it correctly, but most of the time i do it wrong i guess.

ArmokGoB , in Three monitors, and i feel insulted

I have a Dell laptop. That probably explains why I’m such a shitty programmer.

uid0gid0 , in Three monitors, and i feel insulted

We are just carrying on the tradition of das blinkenlights

ohlaph ,

I thought that would lead me to a das keyboard.

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