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Comment by wst_ | Hacker News Reader

I find tons of small commits a clutter and waste of time. I don't see any reason for doing so. On the contrary I can see disadvantage - reading and understanding a history later may become difficult task. After all what counts is your full chunk of work, reviewed via pull request, and merged to master. It should be treated as a whole.

Has it really become so common with git? I don't see such trend around me.

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>On the contrary I can see disadvantage - reading and understanding a history later may become difficult task.

I'm replying to you but this is directed at everybody who advocates squash merge and discourages small commits.

IMO this is a tooling problem, plain and simple. When I am committing to Git, I am using the "write" components of Git which are incredibly powerful. I can commit in as small a chunk as I want and preserve the richest history of all the small changes I've made, knowing full well that the state of the code at HEAD will not be degraded for doing so. If I make two small independent changes, I can feel free to branch them separately and then merge them together to show that they could have been performed in any order.

When you read my history, you are using the "read" components of Git. Unfortunately these are not as powerful. You can do some nice things, like if you want to treat history as a straight line you can use `git log --first-parent` and you'll see only the merge commits (as if all merges had been squash-rebases).

It would be much better if you were able to collapse or expand any sequence of linear commits to gloss over the lower level details. But as far as I'm concerned, this is a problem with the "read" components of Git, not the "write" components, and so I will continue to use the "write" components to their full power. And the best part is that if I do it this way, we can improve the "read" components and allow the reader to collapse my verbose history, but we will never be able to expand pre-collapsed history.

There is "Collapse Linear Branches" action in Intellij's git log viewer (and I guess any Jetbrains IDE) which does pretty much what you describe :-)

The main reason I request commits to be split up is for ease of code review. It's much easier to review three commits that each do one easily comprehensible small thing than one commit that does three things at once. It's also better if you find there's a bug -- you can bisect down to a commit that's fairly small where the bug should be easy to see, rather than one that's enormous and where the bug is hard to find among all the other changes.

I think it is a matter of definition of "small" and "enormous". If you have a small thing, easily comprehensible, but big enough for it to be a complete piece of work. Then probably you also have separate task for it, and the change you introduce doesn't break the build. So it the end it's just a perfect candidate for pull request.

But note the comment above mentioned a commit for variable change. Or a commit for adding some comment sentence. Nano commits they are.

Sure, tasks should be small, easy to get, easy to review. But there must be a balance. Going to extreme, both ways, doesn't do any good.

indeed, if the commits are individually reviewable it is nicer. To the contrary however often these small commits can be a bit messy. Sometimes you'll find commits that are reverted later on, or fixed up later on. I.e. for commit-level review to work well, it's great if the history was polished.

Small, incremental commits are an asset with git blame, git bisect and git revert. I find it much easier to deal with too many small ones, rather than too few large ones. Especially if you keep the convention that master is always "merged into", i.e. "left of the merge", i.e. "parent 1".

especially with very small commits, I find small commits to be tedious and error prone (sometimes the software doesn't even build because the developer distributed two not-so-independent changes over two commits because the connection wasn't so obvious. Then you have a failed build and you don't really know if `git bisect` just beamed you into the middle of a refactoring, or whether there is an actual issue.

> After all what counts is your full chunk of work, reviewed via pull request, and merged to master. It should be treated as a whole.

I find the PR mechanism works great for the view of the whole, whereas the individual commits are great for the pieces. So in my commit history, you can read the timeline, and then if you want to see the commits squashed down, you click on the individual PR. On the PR screen (assuming you're using GitHub), it has a nice list of the subject lines of each of the individual commits.

Commits can serve as a supplement to documentation. When you properly commit the different logical steps that led to the current state of the code, it becomes incredibly easier for another team member to get why and how you have implemented things a certain way.

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