cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/214031
Have you ever used
git bisect? If so, how did you use it? Did it help you find a problem which would otherwise be difficult to find? Story time, I guess?
Multiple times.
Typically on high frequented repositories. If there are a hundred commits (or more) each day, suddenly merged from multiple branches and shit starts to go weird, it is sometimes not clear when exactly it started to go south. So I write a test to reproduce the problem and then let git bisect checkout, run test, etc. until it can tell me which revision it first occurred in.
One time I also had to find out when a specific functionality in a microcontroller broke. I have forgotten, why we knew it worked before without having it covered in a test, though. The build-download-testrun-repeat-cycle took almost a day until it could pinpoint the revision. That was fun. But it nailed it to a single line and was right with it.
I’ve used it only once to find a bug in a section of code at a company I was working for that both me and the other engineer I was working with did not know the history of. We were able to triangulate effectively the root of the pre-existing bug, and kind of how it was introduced, because of the surrounding history. Very useful tool for this purpose, albeit one that I use very infrequently.
I use it from time to time. Often I test manually instead of automatic, and it often works very well.
But if you want a story about an unconventional use of git bisect, I think there’s one about the time I had a directory with lots of files, and one of those files was causing some problem, but I didn’t know which one it was. Those files were not under version control, but I created a repo with them, where each file was added in a separate commit. Then I could use git bisect to find which file was causing the problems.
I’ve done the exact same process by hand, good to know there’s a way to automate it (to an extent)
Can’t remember details, so no particularly interesting story around it I guess. Just a couple of times when something had broken at an unknown point in time and I needed to figure out which commit. I’ve been using git almost since its inception, and in a work setting since maybe 2010. And in that time, I’ve used git-bisect maybe ten times. While that might make it sound like a useless feature, it is a life saver when you do need it.
