Good stuff. Stick with it... the learning curve is not as terrible as you may think it is at the moment, and the benefits or learning this far outweigh the costs (of time spent learning). Version control is as much a part of modern programming as programming languages.Originally Posted by jeremy duncan
I admit that sometimes I am ashamed of my mistakes and would like to leave them out of the history, but it is actually quite irrational: in the end what matters is that you found the bugs and fixed them, not that you had old commits that had the bugs.
That said, with feature branches, it is possible to do a squashed merge of the feature branch to master such that it looks like you wrote that feature in a single magically almost perfect commit. As Hodor noted, you can do this even without feature branches, but I feel that there is a risk that you may get careless and rewrite history that has already been pushed to the origin server, thus causing problems for fellow developers when working in a team.
Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Yes, rewriting history is bad (and infuriating when you have more than one person involved). But it you rewrite history you would have to -f the commit. If your (private) branch has not yet been pushed I see nothing wrong with squashing commits in some cases. BUT, as laserlight pointed out, in many cases it's not desirable. Yeah, there might be 11 commits instead of 1 but so what? Having a history of changes is kinda the point and if there are 11 small changes (commits) instead of 1 squashed commit and some bug shows up in the future then there are ways to narrow down the exact change that caused the bug (bisecting the problem). If there are a huge amount of changes in a single commit then the usefulness of this debugging feature (finding where the bug was introduced) becomes a lot less useful.
Thanks everyone for your help. Merry Christmas.
You may never be shown refactoring in a beginner's book. There are some for other audiences, but even if you never read it in a book, being able to refactor is a valued skill. It comes down to producing something professional.
