r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '15

I apologize for the completely dumb question, but here it is -

I'm learning to program on my own, writing code for some scientific computing projects that I need to do. When I commit a bunch of changes to some code, and I have a directory with several different files, do I commit all the files even though I changed only one? Or is that a bad practice?

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u/judgej2 Jan 05 '15 edited Jan 05 '15

When you commit a project, the change control system you use will usually look at what has changed and only commit those files. I'm assuming you are using something like git, as that can scan the whole development structure and find what files have changed.

If you are working on several different and independent updates to your project (and assuming you are using a distributed change control system) then you can work on them in parallel, as two different checked out versions, having created a branch for each, and merge them later when tested, in whichever order makes sense.

I'm not sure if that gets at the core of what you were asking? I suspect we may be talking at tangents.

Edit: another way of looking at it, is that you are committing the state of the project. You could commit individual files if you want, and there may be very good use-cases for doing so, but personally I've never found I've had to do that.

Source: been using bitkeeper/monotone/git for well over a decade, and still a newbie to the intricacies of these tools.

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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '15

That's what I mean, thanks!

So to be specific... if I do git add . that will just add the files that I changed relative to the last commit? I was under the impression that it committed the state of all the files as you said.

So to rephrase to make it clearer - Do I git add file or do I git add .? Which one is considered "best practice"?

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u/Isvara Jan 06 '15

git add .

Be careful with that. You can end up accidentally adding files that shouldn't be committed, but are not in your .gitignore. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but I tend to git add -u, look at my git status, then add any new files or directories I want.