Fossil

to bugs, and hence makes them less productive.  Many developers are
drawn to private branches out of sense of ego.  "I want to get the
code right before I publish it."  I sympathize with this sentiment,
and am frequently guilty of it myself.  It is humbling to display
your stupid mistake to the whole world on an internet that
never forgets.  And yet, humble programmers generate better code.

What is the fastest path to solid code? Is it to continue staring at
your private branch to seek out every last bug, or is it to publish it
as-is, whereupon the many eyeballs will immediately see that last stupid
error in the code? Testing and development are often done by separate
groups within a larger software development organization, because
developers get too close to their own code to see every problem in it.

Given that, is it better for those many eyeballs to find your problems
while they’re still isolated on a feature branch, or should that vetting
wait until you finally push a collapsed version of a private working
branch to the parent repo? Will the many eyeballs even see those errors
when they’re intermingled with code implementing some tasty new feature?

## <a name="testing"></a>4.0 Rebase commits untested check-ins to the blockchain

Rebase adds new check-ins to the blockchain without giving the operator
an opportunity to test and verify those check-ins.  Just because the
underlying three-way merge had no conflict does not mean that the resulting
code actually works.  Thus, rebase runs the very real risk of adding
non-functional check-ins to the permanent record.