TITLE: Dreaming in Git
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 16, 2020 10:47 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 I recently read
<A HREF="https://fivebooks.com/best-books/philosophical-wonder-eric-schwitzgebel/">
   a Five Books interview</A>
 about the best books on philosophical wonder.  One of the books
 recommended by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel was <EM>Diaspora</EM>,
 a science fiction novel by Greg Egan I've never read.  The story unfolds
 in a world where people are able to destroy their physical bodies to
 upload themselves into computers.  Unsurprisingly, this leads to some
 fascinating philosophical possibilities:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Well, for one thing you could duplicate yourself.  You could back
 yourself up.  Multiple times.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 <B>And then have divergent lives, as it were, in parallel but
 diverging</B>.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Yes, and then there'd be the question, "do you want to merge back
 together with the person you diverged from?"
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 Egan wrote <EM>Diaspora</EM> before the heyday of distributed version
 control, before <TT>darcs</TT> and <TT>mercurial</TT> and <TT>git</TT>.
 With distributed VCS, a person could checkout a new personality, or
 change branches and be a different person every day.  We could run
 diffs to figure out what makes one version of a self so different from
 another.  If things start going too wrong, we could always revert to
 an earlier version of ourselves and try again.  And all of this could
 happen with copies of the software -- ourselves -- running in parallel
 somewhere in the world.

 And then there's Git.  Imagine writing such a story now, with Git's
 complex model of versioning and prodigious set of commands and flags.
 Not only could people branch and merge, checkout and diff...  A person
 could try something new without ever committing changes to the
 repository.  We'd have to figure out what it means to
 <TT>push origin</TT> or <TT>reset --hard HEAD</TT>.  We'd be able to
 rewrite history by rebasing, amending, and squashing.  A Git guru can
 surely explain why we'd need to <TT>--force-with-lease</TT> or
 <TT>--unset-upstream</TT>, but even I can imagine the delightful
 possibilities of <TT>git stash</TT> in my personal improvement plan.

 Perhaps the final complication in our novel would involve a merge so
 complex that we need a third-party diff tool to help us put our desired
 self back together.  Alas, a Python library or Ruby gem required by the
 tool has gone stale and breaks an upgrade.  Our hero must find a solution
 somewhere in her tree of blobs, or be doomed to live a forever splintered
 life.

 If you ever see a book named <EM>Dreaming in Git</EM> or <EM>Bug
 Report</EM> on an airport bookstore's shelves, take a look.  Perhaps
 I will have written the first of my Git fantasies.
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