> since the commit chain can be cleaned up later.
This seems to be one of the major divisions in SCM users, some see it as a clean up for seeing a understandable 'history', others see it as a falsification.
This seems to be one of the major divisions in SCM users, some see it as a clean up for seeing a understandable 'history', others see it as a falsification.
I don't see it as a falsification. I see it as making the history less understandable. Having a track of what happened, can help in understanding what was intended. Code archeology regularly helps me understand Chesterton's fence.
Programmers are human. They make mistakes. The thing is not perfect at the time of squashing. When the inevitable issue crops up in production, I really want all the information I can get.
If you start cleaning stuff up, not only do you deny me information about how the code evolved, you also introduce another point at which a flawed understanding can mislead those that come after you.
It is super nice to see if it was 20 code commits and then one test commit, or back and forth between tests and code, or a new test and then code commits.
The main problem is when the programmer who created the squashed commit is no longer around.
That subtle bug they introduced in that squashed commit now has to be picked apart without any context. If I have 10,000 tiny commits (and it's never quite that bad because programmers are lazy gits), I can reconstruct come of the context of how that bug got into the codebase and what was going through their head when it occurred.
The other problem with squashed commits is that nobody will ever agree on what the correct granularity of a squash should be. Even if you give me the ability to squash, I won't. Someone else will squash 1,000 lines of changes, and I'll want to scream.
And, to be fair, even Linux doesn't really like squashed commits at the individual level. Try feeding one of those big squashed patches into most maintainers. They'll tell you to GTFO until you bust that apart.
Instead, every single part of your patch should be in a small standalone commit, as far as I understand it.
If I see some behaviour that changed in a commit that says "lint fixes", I can be pretty sure you didn't intend that. I'm still going to check, but if I don't find anything to give me pause, I'm confident in reversing it.
If I see it in a commit that says "fix edge case", I'm going to check, double check and triple check if that edge case is still resolved after my fix.
The "oops" and "work in progress" things hold no information, but since that's the default, well... Too bad.
A cute little paragraph is almost certainly going to leave out details I need. I'll probably ignore it, because it's either unnecessary verbiage, or inane. Probably both.
Meanwhile if you demand meaningful messages for every tiny commit, you'll be lucky if you get much more than "fix".
Also, I demand nothing, not even a certain commit message. What I ask is that you don't expend effort to destroy information.
I understand the desire to hide one's flaws. To hide the thought process to make yourself look better. But it's not necessary. Everybody has flaws and it's far better to have the thinking in the open, so we can see and work with it.
Name your commits appropriately and don't commit for every comma.
People learn quickly the lay of the land, if they have to.
We don't expect people to give important speeches without writing a draft first, nor do we insist on seeing all their drafts. Why is this any different?
Think of your branch as being one long multi-day math problem. If I'm grading your work, I don't want you to show me all the parts you think are neat and tidy and important after you arrive at what you think is the answer. I want to see everything you tried, even the stuff that didn't work.
I'm not opposed to only having merge commits on master, but somewhere, on some branch which is recorded for all of time, I want to be able to see every decision that was made to bring HEAD to what it is right now, on the most granular level possible.
Yes, a maths teacher wants to see the working to a problem, but the working can still be the second draft, written neatly and well explained. For a complicated problem, it should not be expected that someone will read through all the “scratch work”.
Do people really read through the changelog commit by commit? What's gained by that?
I don't read through it at all. I zoom into a point that I need to know more about. I have information (bug report, runtime behaviour on other data) that allows me to zoom into a specific part. The information I have is from the committer's future. It's highly unlikely that the details needed are in the summary that they wrote.
You think that lots of tiny commits, each providing an incremental, working improvement to the code is bad practice?
And for your example, if they're measurable improvements you should be able to write a decent commit message.
1. Worked
2. Grabbed a coffee
3. Worked again
You are falsifying history. One commit or more per butt-in-seat mini session.[1] Anything else is borderline fraudulent.
[1] Or per balls-of-feet in front of your standing desk, if that is how you roll.
I take issue with tools that prioritize rebasing, because they usually make this distinction between rebasing a local branch and rebasing a shared branch. For example, GitHub's "Squash and Merge" or "Rebase and Merge" options break the shared history between the remote copy of the repo and my local copy. After such an operation, I cannot merge from main into my development branch, and must instead rebase my development branch onto main.
Some people want to rather merge instead, but in my experience few people have the discipline to develop in large enough PR granularity to make the resulting merge commits meaningful and not polluting history while also keeping the non-merge commits meaningful by doing rebases while the change is still in review.
One is always curating history by deciding when to commit instead of dumping the whole undo tree.