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Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I only care about when the code hit master. Because that's when it could potentially have broken shit for everyone.

That I committed it locally is pretty irrelevant: I could just as well NOT have committed it, made a backup of the files on the side, copied them back in...from the perspective of the rest of my team, my local history is an implementation detail.

If the only thing I do is manipulate my local history, then open a PR and merge, master's history will actually show something much closer to the truth: That on X date I added something to master.

That I spent 6 weeks and 300 commits locally to do it (kids, don't do this at home!), literally doesn't matter to anyone.

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> Personally, I only care about when the code hit master.

So just look for the merge commit on the master branch that brought it in.

By having 300 separate commits (which you were doing anyway) it helps us know what your thought process was on the day that a given line changed. Maybe you were refactoring function X to do Y. If you don't mention that you were accounting for changes happening in someone else's branch, then we know we have to look closer at that code. Without the individual commit, all we know is that giant-project-x was accomplished with this commit, and the change to that line may or may not have the necessary update.

By having a history of every single key you typed to create this comment, it would help me know what your thought process was when you typed it up. Maybe you got pissed off and wrote a swear word or two and then backspaced. Maybe you worded something awkwardly and then refactored your sentence. Without all of your keystroke history, all we know is that a comment was made by you, and your opinion may or may not have taken into account certain arguments made by others in the same thread around the time that the comment was published.

> it helps us know what your thought process was on the day that a given line changed

This is not something someone who actually spends his days reading code would say.

Code is hard to read as it is. Presenting it in well packages, readable commits is the very least one can do.

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