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.
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.