I tell my children not to lie. My parents told me not to lie. I’m pretty sure that by far most parents tell their children not to lie. Aside from used car salesmen and politicians, I think not lying is pretty engrained in what we expect of each other. That is not to say that used car salesmen and politicians lie: that is to say we expect them to lie: there is an engrained distrust in society toward people who embellish or promise things for a living.
The real problem is when procedures force us to lie, and force us to use our tools in a way to make them lie. One way to make my favorite version control tool, Git, lie is by using git-rebase. The rebase command allows you to re-write history — to pretend that when you created a given branch isn’t really when you created that branch: you created it at some other point in the code’s history in stead.
