[Rd] Why R should never move to git

[Hugh Parsonage]

I think the problem you're experiencing is not uncommon but has a solution.

FWIW, I prefer git, but I think the best version control system for R
is whatever R-core prefers. If they were 2% more productive working in
an MS Word documents with Track Changes than git, so much worse for
git.

On 25 January 2018 at 10:17, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lately I've been doing some work with the manipulateWidget package, which
> lives on Github at
> https://github.com/rte-antares-rpackage/manipulateWidget/.  Last week I
> found a bug, so being a good community member, I put together a patch.
>
> Since the package lives on Github, I followed instructions to put together a
> "pull request":
>
> - I forked the main branch to my own Github account as
> <https://github.com/dmurdoch/manipulateWidget>.
>
> - I checked out my fork into RStudio.
>
> - I fixed the bug, and submitted the pull request
> <https://github.com/rte-antares-rpackage/manipulateWidget/pull/47>.
>
> Then I felt good about myself, and continued on with my work.  Today I
> tracked down another bug, unrelated to the previous one.  I know enough
> about git to know that I shouldn't commit this fix to my fork, because it
> would then become part of the previous pull request.
>
> So I created a branch within my fork, and committed the change there. But
> Github provides no way to create a pull request that only includes the new
> stuff!  Every attempt I made would have included everything from both bug
> fixes.
>
> I've read online about creating a new branch based on the master copy, and
> "cherry picking" just the final change:  but all the instructions I've tried
> so far have failed.
>
> Okay, I know the solution:  I need to burn the whole thing down (to quote
> Jenny Bryan).  I'll just create a new fork, and put the new bug fix in a
> branch there.
>
> I can't!  I don't know if this is a Git restriction or a Github restriction,
> but it won't let me create a new fork without deleting the old one.  I don't
> know if deleting the previous fork would also delete the previous PR, so I'm
> not going to do this.
>
> This is ridiculous!  It is such an easy concept:  I want to take the diff
> between my most recent commit and the one before, and send that diff to the
> owners of the master copy.  This should be a trivial (and it is in svn).
>
> Git and Github allow the most baroque arrangements, but can't do this simple
> task.  That's an example of really bad UI design.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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