Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Nice project, but I'm interested in why the decision was made to flatten all commits for publishing? It makes it harder to understand the codebase, harder to contribute, and suggests a lack of commitment to the open-source model.

Is the plan to develop in the open from now on, or to drop releases developed in private in large flattened commits like this?

View on HN

> suggests a lack of commitment to the open-source model.

I literally chuckled when I read your comment. It sounds reasonable to flatten commits before a release, as I, and others, who are hacking on code litter their history with "fix this" / "fix that" / "asjhdasjd" / "f**".

Open source model doesn't mean version control transparency. Open source model could also be development done in a private fork, and release commits dumped into a public repository.

Yeah, open source could mean code distributed in zip bundles. Git history is an orthogonal concern.

I said "open source model" rather than just open source. While open source is only about the licence, I think publishing on GitHub typically implies a further model of accepting contributions, developing in the open, and being a part of that ecosystem.

In my experience this is how open source projects tend to thrive in the last 15 years or so. Projects that are open source but don't accept contributions and just dump a zip on a website somewhere once a year are a very different thing and lose some of the benefits.

I concur, my first commit was a big one, squashed to avoid showing my shitty history, after coding an MVP for 3 months. I initially had no intention to open-source, so I was caring at all about my commit history. I still had one or two questions like "is it even your code?".

Hey! Initially the project was not going to be open, since i included some payment integration and credentials and more stuff, but at the end i removed, so that's why i pushed in to a new repo to prevent to leak this information and obviously i have alot of bad code/commits etc, so i preffer to start on a clean repo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com