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Comment by lucumo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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The issue is most of my commits have little meaning and often include in progress commits where code is not even functional/tests may crash. Especially as I have tooling that builds artifacts for me based on commits/runs ci based on commits. Often I’ll commit something just to see the result from ci running it or to build artifact for a small test deployment fully expecting it to not work yet. After I’m done I’ll collapse all commits for a pr into one for the actual thing the pr aimed to do and aim to keep collapsed commit around <300 lines.

That is ok. A proficient code reader will see that you like to commit -m’typo’ and -m’testing CI has to go thru git; try this now’ and understand your life and save the detailed nitpicking for the overall diff, not each commit.

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.

So rather than a small mini essay written after a squash on one commit you'd rather get 10,000 "work in progress" and "oops" and "lint fixes"?

This is a Git misfeature more other source control systems didn't share. Svn, Perforce, etc.

Name your commits appropriately and don't commit for every comma.

People learn quickly the lay of the land, if they have to.

>don't commit for every comma

You think that lots of tiny commits, each providing an incremental, working improvement to the code is bad practice?

What I'm saying and what you're saying are not the same thing.

And for your example, if they're measurable improvements you should be able to write a decent commit message.

I could, it would just be a waste of time. IME commit messages are the least looked at form of documentation period.

Quite the opposite, this is the best feature of Git. Commit often, don't be afraid to experiment since you can always roll back easily even if it's literally just a single comma - and then when it's time to share that code with others, then reorganize history into a sequence of well-named commits with clean description of what each of them does.

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?

It's different for the same reason math teachers want you to "show your work" in addition to simply writing down the answer to a problem. They way you as a human have approached the problem and worked it out is valuable information in both the review of the work itself and in understanding what has gone wrong when something has gone wrong.

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.

There is a path between these two points of view.

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”.

> 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.

I totally would. I want the essay somewhere, but maybe on the functions or new files. You can read commits and diffs very fast with a git log -p

110% Absolutely.

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.

However, Linux wants you to submit piecemeal patches. Not patches that are a mess and then fixed with a later "woops" commit.

Instead, every single part of your patch should be in a small standalone commit, as far as I understand it.

Yes.

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.

If the squash has, say, < ~150 lines of code the edge case should A) jump out on the PR, B) be covered by tests.

Meanwhile if you demand meaningful messages for every tiny commit, you'll be lucky if you get much more than "fix".

Again, humans are flawed. We have code that is probably broken. There's definitely a chance that the test is broken or incomplete too.

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.

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