Comment by jschwartzi
10 years ago
It's probably the same idea as the one behind committing once in Mercurial and then using commit --amend repeatedly as you refine the changes. Git's method sounds like it avoids a pitfall in that method by holding your last changeset in a special area rather than dumping it into a commit so that you can't accidentally push it.
I often amend my latest commit as a way to build a set of changes without losing my latest functional change.
I always do a hg diff before I commit. If in spite of that I still screw up, I do a hg rollback, and if I already pushed, I either roll back on all the nodes, or I open a bug, and simply commit a bug fix with a reference to the bug in the bug tracking system. I've been using Mercurial since 2007 and I've yet to use --amend.