The Git language

I came to realize that Git is not only a “fast version control”, but also a language (lingo, slang) that sounds very obscure to the non-initiated. This is exacerbated by the feature of the English language where every noun can be verbed and every verb can be nouned. I collected a number of quotes from Git documentation that are virtually incomprehensible even to seasoned developers not familiar with git, and some of them are outright weird. The expressive power of “pushing to your fork” probably rivals the famous “swan song of the fascist octopus” referenced by George Orwell.

"You’re safe to rebase even after you’ve pushed to your fork".

"The consensus inside the... development team is to never rebase during a pull request".

"Squashing* the feature down to a handful of commits can hide context".

"When rebasing with remote branches you need to "force push" at some point".

Actual error message:
"To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected".

* in this case “squashing” is not a figure of speach. It refers to a particular feature of the rebase command.

I record these mostly for my future reference, in case I become one of them and forget how ridiculous these utterances used to look.

Posted in

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *