And yet if you _don't_ push it to the server, then nobody else can see it. And don't you want other people to see develop branches to give feedback and even to collaborate on writing?
In practice, what everyone does is they DO rewrite history on those pushed dev branches, and they TRY to avoid the world of hurt by some convention for keeping track of what branches are 'development branches', and knowing that their history can change, and thus not _pulling_ from these branches into anything except a branch that does nothing but track the dev branch. And then using 'rebase' in just the right way on your local copy of that dev branch, when you need to. And then winding up in that world of hurt when something goes wrong.
Contrary to all the git apologists in this thread, i think it is one of the biggest usability problems with git. I'm not familiar enough with the other dcvs to know if they manage to do this better. I do know for all that, branching/merging is still a hell of a lot better than it was with svn.
What I myself tend to do is avoid ever rewriting history, sacrificing 'cleanness' for reliability and safety. Except when I'm working on a dev branch for an open source project where they insist upon it, and then I worry, and mess up a lot, and spend lots of time recovering from my mistakes.
In practice, what everyone does is they DO rewrite history on those pushed dev branches, and they TRY to avoid the world of hurt by some convention for keeping track of what branches are 'development branches', and knowing that their history can change, and thus not _pulling_ from these branches into anything except a branch that does nothing but track the dev branch. And then using 'rebase' in just the right way on your local copy of that dev branch, when you need to. And then winding up in that world of hurt when something goes wrong.
Contrary to all the git apologists in this thread, i think it is one of the biggest usability problems with git. I'm not familiar enough with the other dcvs to know if they manage to do this better. I do know for all that, branching/merging is still a hell of a lot better than it was with svn.
What I myself tend to do is avoid ever rewriting history, sacrificing 'cleanness' for reliability and safety. Except when I'm working on a dev branch for an open source project where they insist upon it, and then I worry, and mess up a lot, and spend lots of time recovering from my mistakes.