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Daniel Janus

Daniel Janus blog.danieljanus.pl

Things I wish Git had: Commit groups

Commit groups sounds interesting to me. Anyone reading this familiar with Git innards? Is this doable?

You know the “group” facility of vector graphics programs? You draw a couple of shapes, you group them together, and then you can apply transformations to the entire group at once, operating on it as if it were an atomic thing. But when need arises, you can “ungroup” it and look deeper.

I’d love to see that same idea applied to Git commits. In Git, a commit group might just be a named and annotated range of commits: feature-a might be the same as 5d64b71..3db02d3. Every Git command that currently accepts commit ranges could accept group names. I envision groups to have descriptions, so that git log, git blame, etc could take –grouped or –ungrouped options and act appropriately.

Daniel Janus blog.danieljanus.pl

How do we recreate the Web of Documents?

This excellent post is a mix of history and possible futures:

As the WWW spread, it grew features. Soon, it was not enough for the documents to contain just text: support for images was added. People wanted to customize the look of the documents, so HTML gained presentational markup abilities, eventually obsoleted by CSS. It was not enough to be able to view the menu of your local pizza store – people wanted to actually order a pizza: the need for sessions yielded cookies and non-idempotent HTTP methods. And people wanted the pages to be interactive, so they became scriptable.

All these features were good. They helped the Web meet actual needs. But having them has a significant consequence, one that is seldom realized:

We don’t have a Web of Documents anymore.

Daniel goes on to argue that what we have today is a Web of Applications, but he believes we can recreate the old web by adding just three restraints

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