there's something weird about git branches that "a branch is just a reference to a commit" does not capture and I've been struggling with it for weeks
like in this diagram I think most people would say that there are 3 branches (corresponding to the 3 commits at the top of the diagram), though technically in git you could have 0, 3, or 100 branches here, and it's not labelled so you have no way to know how many branches there are
(please don't try to explain branches to me ty)
the thing is I feel like it's not really wrong to say that there are 3 branches in that diagram, even though you can easily argue that it's not technically true
like I think people have an intuitive idea of branches that's different from "a branch is a reference to a commit" and it feels like a lot of git is actually built to support that intuitive idea and it seems weird to try to erase it
(2/?)
@b0rk at the same time git fails at supporting that intuitive model across history editing operations: there is no way to implement the equivalent of `hg evolve` and the recursive across branches behavior of `hg rebase`, ~because branches' relationships are a function of commits' relationships.
