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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

The log should track the product's evolution, not the developers' activities.

Git is a development tool, not a product release tool. If you want to see the product evolution you could filter to just merge commits, or just merge commits in a specific format.

If you want to keep track of releases specifically, then use tags, that's what they're for. I suppose you could make a separate branch/repo where every commit = a release, but that opens you up to merge conflicts without any benefit over tags

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At the end of the day everything depends on the organization. In a hectic startup where requirements change on an hourly basis and releases are made several times a day, I would absolutely insist on keeping the log linear and as clear as possible. Tags are important, of course, but they're not that useful for analyzing a repository.

When I say "the evolution of the product" I really mean "the "evolution of the code". When a small feature branch with 5 commits - four of which say "wip" and the last one says "added color support" - gets merged as is, and all relevant information is held hostage by whatever Git platform the company is using this week and not inside the repository itself, the log is not useful to me regardless of any strategy.

But in a different setting I would not necessarily insist in the same way.

Yes, it can be annoying if your developers are committing nonsense, but then just tell them to not do that, or to rebase locally before pushing.

If you find yourself troubleshooting a bunch of nonsense commits, you can just do a diff to the merge commit, and it will show you all the changes. But you also have the option of figuring out exactly which commit caused the problem, and seeing it in context. If I see an error in the middle of a bunch of commits that look like "trying x with y." Then I know that this is a tricky problem, and the developer was lucky to get it to work at all. If it is in the middle of a standard looking commit, then the developer didn't struggle with this. So maybe they didn't put enough effort into it, or maybe it is a rare corner case.

When I'm troubleshooting other peoples problems, every bit of information helps. Especially when the developer who introduced the problems is no longer with the company. Squashing commits removes some of that information, without providing anything that I can't approximate by using merge commits in logging/diffs.

> Yes, it can be annoying if your developers are committing nonsense, but then just tell them to not do that, or to rebase locally before pushing.

I'm pretty sure rebasing locally is exactly what the person you're arguing with is arguing for. The original comment in this thread was saying you should never rebase, always just merge.

To be clear, what I'm advocating for is that feature branches get rebased regularly by the developer until PR-time and a clean merge into the mainline. I usually recommend squashing to one commit but do not insist.

I can definitely see how those intermediate commits can provide more information, but there's a tradeoff. More often than not, they do not provide me much value, and instead give me bloat, so I prefer to keep things simple.

Telling developers not to do something is like telling a kid not to push that red button. The average developer chooses what's easiest _right now_ and thinks it's someone else's job to fix the mess at PR time. And they're afraid, because that one time five years ago they ran a rebase without knowing what it does, and lost some code without knowing it's actually right there in the reflog, and since then they are deathly afraid of Git. I know how to use log and diff and all the others quite well, but most don't. So I'm trying to make things easier on everyone in the long term, not the short term.

"Why doesn't git bisect work?"

"well, it landed on this rebased commit that's huge. I guess it was a kind of useful, just not as useful as we'd like".

Haha, true! On the other hand, is that better or worse than running into a string of "wip" commits that had the code in a broken state.

But if the alternative is that it's ten commits and most of them don't work anyway, the bisect takes longer to give you the same lousy information.

That's not the alternative, who develops like that?

It's like the first time I saw the essay calling ORM's the "vietnam of the software industry". I remember reading it and wondering who the hell would use ORM's in that manner?

Apparently a lot of people, but if you're using rebase because you don't know how to create commits that build and are functional then I submit the issue is with you.

> That's not the alternative, who develops like that?

As an independent contractor working with many different companies, unfortunately, virtually everybody.

I've been recommending making a git tag before rebasing. eg:

  git tag -f pre-rebase

> If I see an error in the middle of a bunch of commits that look like "trying x with y." Then I know that this is a tricky problem, and the developer was lucky to get it to work at all.

Just an aside, but if there problem being solved is harder than it looks then this deserves a comment explaining why in either the commit message or in the code itself.

    git add .; and git commit --amend --no-edit; git push origin --force

Rarely, I have to do pipeline work on repositories. You'd normally see twenty "Fix Jankins Issue" commits on the main branch because of some nonsense that only happens when you deploy UAT or whatever. Once I learned this little gem, this is also how I manage my feature branches mostly. But also my employer's fleet of laptops has been aging and I've had to do 3 swap outs this year, so I like to keep my in progress work pushed up just in case.

git add .

We have had multiple security incidents because some developer left a credential file inside the local git clone (no, not all tooling supports out-of-tree stored credentials). Blind 'git add .' is the first thing I teach my developers not to do.

git add . is very useful though. Surely, the first thing to teach here is to always git status before committing?

My typical workflow is to git add . to see the mess I’ve made then decide how to clean it up. If I’ve mistakenly added a credentials file, the fix is to add it to the gitignore and unstage it, not JUST unstage it.

Not saying that you shouldn’t do both, but maintaining a gitignore and completely removing the potential problem for other people seems better than pretending your tool is more limited than it is.

If you can tolerate a GUI, Git Cola might be a solution. I'm using it exclusively for some 5 years now – it's lightweight enough, but still makes you think about what you're about to commit. You can add things to .gitignore directly from there, too.

https://git-cola.github.io/

Default layout is a bit weird IMO, here's what I'm doing instead: https://u.ale.sh/my-git-cola-screenshot.png

You don't use .gitignore? All our projects use dotenv for local credentials with a .gitignore that covers build, log, and any *.env file.

Sounds like you need better tooling, tbh.

I did this for a while but have moved on to

    git commit --fixup HEAD

and you can tack an -e on the end to add more notes in the commit message body. You can fixup prior commits by supplying their short hash, which is how I originally discovered this: I essentially wanted to amend a commit farther back in my branch.

This makes a commit with a “fixup!” prefix that works with

    git rebase --interactive --autosquash

you can also form that kind of commit directly, and there is also a “squash!” directive. Now you don’t have to force push amended commits. And it helps sometimes when you accidentally amend something you didn’t mean to–now you can just soft reset to HEAD~1 and try again.

I don’t even bother locally rebasing to autosquash it all anymore since we use squash-to-merge/rebase in github PRs now.

I did something very similar with a bash function:

  function git-commit-fixup() {
    git commit --fixup ":/$*"
  }
  alias gcf="git-commit-fixup"
  # Looks for the most recent commit that matches its arg
  # eg: we have three commits with messages: 
  #   "fix: the thing" 
  #   "feat: 5 percent cooler"
  #   "test: test coolness"
  # then we do some work and git add, then do:
  gcf cooler
  # now we have 4 commits: "
  #   "fix: the thing" 
  #   "feat: 5 percent cooler"
  #   "test: test coolness"
  #   "fixup! feat: 5 percent cooler"
  # And autosquash will combine the fixup commit with the appropriate semantic commit as you say.

Sadly I haven't been using it much as someone introduced a bunch of commit lint git hooks that choke horribly on the "fixup!" part. And you can't pass --no-verify while rebasing.

I'd probably suggest --force-with-lease just to be sure ;)

Me too. I made an alias that was _shorter_ than --force to make it easier to type (and hence more likely for me to use by default).

You can combine

  git add .; git commit --amend --no-edit;

with the `-a` option

  git -a --amend --no-edit;

> feature branch with 5 commits - four of which say "wip"

Merge+squash eliminates this and it works every time. One or two clicks on gitlab for example.

Actually you're both wrong, its a change tool, not a development or a product release tool.

"then use tags, that's what they're for"

No they're not - that's definitely a useful way of using them, but they are just labels.

Why is it useful to know this? Well, when you know your tool better (how it operates, not the porcelain or CLI), you have better insights and are able to use it better.

You can manage Agile-style "features" with nothing but hashes and tags, no branches necessary. Branches are actually somewhat antithetical to distributed development, they're a useful concept, but that's all they are.

I do tend to agree though, re-base is superior to merge, in a product setting. If you want to track a feature set, having the set of commits which represents that feature set is better than a litany of nonsense tangled up in twelve feature "roots" (branches which have been merged together).

In a "do what I want" setting, rebase and merge are about equal, though. If I want to work on 3 features independently, I'd like to be able to easily see both features in parallel. I also would like to squash my features to single commits, and rebase them into feature branches where I can then merge/rebase/whatever those into my final "product" branch.

> Actually you're both wrong, its a change tool, not a development or a product release tool.

It's funny that HN can't agree on what Git is.

If you ask me: a low-level SCM framework.

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