--amend : Another reason I like Git

Once upon a time...

I worked in an office on a large development team that used a centralized source control management (SCM) system. One of the amusing check-ins you would inevitably see from time to time would be the "file I forgot to add" check-ins.

It happened like this: You made a significant change, played with one or two different solutions, did some refactoring, and came up with a significant change, and along the way you added some files. Sometimes you would remember to let the SCM system know they were added, other times you would forget & shortly after you checked in (if you were lucky enough to catch it yourself) or some time the next day (when the poor sap who had "build duty" caught you) you had to check in that last file. It was an additional checkin, and had a comment like:

"Woops, forgot this file with change #####".

Of course if anybody else wanted your change, or later wanted to roll back to a that change, they needed 2 "changelists" to identify what should have been a single point in the repository history; and they needed to know they needed both changes. It was pretty rare that it created any real problems, but I prefer the git way.

Git has a wonderful set of features around the commit keyword for fixing these mistakes. You can actually undo, redo, pick apart and merge changes that have been committed. With git you can have a much cleaner history of changes.

Upon having commited (but not pushed) a change and realizing I need to fix it I can just make and add whatever changes and then perform a:

git commit --amend

It's even possible to change older commits, provided you haven't pushed them to a shared repository, but that's out of scope for today. (You would use rebase to get to the commit you want to change.)

It's important to note that you should not try to amend a change that has been pushed to a shared repository. Git normally won't let you do this and if you force your way around it the change becomes a different change (the hash changes, even if you change just the message) and then you can have two sets of "reality" or "history" in different repositories. You're basically changing things that "can't" or "shouldn't" be changed in the repository history... and then even The Doctor won't be able to save you from your collaborators.

Ok, so --amend only helps when you catch the mistake yourself, still, a nice thing to have in the tool-chest.