Hacker News Reader

Comment by dapirian | Hacker News Reader

If each of your commits are tested and make sense independently, they should be different PRs - sounds to me like you're just smashing 5 stacked PRs into 1 with highly fussy curated commits, which aren't guaranteed by github settings to each be passing CI

View on HN

PRs are just logical groupings of commits. It makes it efficient to group related commits together. You are correct that each of the commits could be separate PRs which is part of the advantage to this pattern—code contribution is always atomic and easily organized. How you organize these contributions is done whichever way makes it easiest to get merged in efficiently.

I think the parent's point is that if you only just choose to think of the PR as the "unit of change" on your software product, rather than commits, all of this extra discipline you're imposing on yourself just goes away.

And what do you lose by making this decision?

The main branch, being the only place where the changes really matter, can still capture all of the necessary details of the changes (based on the PR) in the commit message when it's merged. This is the point where the curation is most useful, and where it's easiest to apply and apply standards, run tests, and actually enforce that they're followed.

> all of this extra discipline you're imposing on yourself just goes away.

I think the extra discipline is just shifted to the PR in that case instead of the commits. What's lost is the ability to make code contributions of related changes together in a PR which can be more efficient than making many small PRs.

The extra discipline I'm talking about has to do with curating the commits in order to make them meaningful. Here's an example of this from the wild:

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/pull/350#issuecomment-...

BurntSushi (the project maintainer) didn't care about the story the commits told, he cared about the entirety of the changes being made to the repo (at the PR level).

> What's lost is the ability to make code contributions of related changes together in a PR

You're considering each minor commit to be an independent code contribution. BurntSushi instead considered the PR to be the code contribution. The code changes are the same either way you look at it, and there is a single PR in both cases, so it's a matter of choosing your perspective.

I'm finding it difficult to follow the thread of discussion here, so I'll just blurt out some things:

* Most PRs that come in do indeed get squashed merged, but because of a few reasons. Sometimes it's because the PR is really just one logical change and really should just be one commit. Sometimes it's because the commit messages are not written in a way that I like, and so I do a squash-merge so I can either edit or re-write the commit messages provided by the author.

* Sometimes I do a "rebase and merge" if the commit breakdown is good and so are the messages. It's somewhat rare, but some contributors get it right. I'm fine with a single PR containing multiple commits, but the common case is indeed "one PR = one commit."

* I don't usually levy this criticism because I think it's low-brow, but the OP here---"git commit messages are useless"---is pretty egregious clickbait. Halfway into the article, the OP acknowledges that they aren't useless, but just useless in the context of a PR workflow. Which... I don't also 100% agree with, but is usually true for very small changes. What an annoying submission.

Thanks for weighing in.

I agree the title is clickbait but I didn't mind the article because it may challenge the reader to reconsider why they're putting so much effort into individual commits, even if they're not convinced to abandon (PR branch) commit messages entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com