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Comment by tail_exchange | Hacker News Reader

My experience has been the opposite. Every organization I worked at used Trunk based development (feature branch->master). Because branches are short lived and usually small, they are the atomic representation of a change, and not the commits in the pull request. Pull requests usually have lots of "linting", "fixing test", "fixing typo" commits that I absolutely do not want in my master branch.

I understand that not all organizations work like this, but that is my point: there is nuance. Blanket statements like these are not productive. The author seems frustrated that people still use squash merge, and just assumes that it's because people just don't understand how git works.

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The poor commit quality is your issue here, and squashing is merely a way to avoid addressing it. That only makes squashing a good tool to use to make a big mess a slightly smaller mess.

Thank you, but no. I enjoy working on a branch and committing small changes at a time, sometimes trivial, sometimes not even compiling, sometimes formatting or whatever the hell I feel like.

When it comes time to review, I squash all those trivial changes manually (rebase -i) and present a clean branch for review.

We could try harder to enforce stricter policies on devs to ensure they're much more disciplined about their initial commits, but what we do works for us. It allows faster iteration and then we enforce squash and merge once ready to go to master.

I don't understand why this bothers some people so much that they spend time ranting "you're using git wrong". If it was wrong, we'd be noticing and change our workflow. But it doesn't feel wrong, so we'll continue to use it.

Interactive rebasing away fixups in your branch is not squash merging. I agree that fixing a typo in a variable or a small linting issue in a previous (recent or not-pushed) commit in your branch is usually good. A carefully crafted commit history is all anyone can ask for. But then squashing away that history once the PR is merged would be a waste of a good history and the effort you put into it. If you end up squashing your history away anyway, why bother cleaning it up in an interactive rebase?

I can't follow what you're saying. Once people start reviewing the PR, we typically do not manually squash (rebase -i) because it is helpful to see how the flow of the review went. Following this, we sometimes end up with 10 commits on a PR that are just addressing various comments, nitpicky or not.

Then once approved, we click the "squash and merge" button, and github squashes all that useless noise into a single commit on master for us.

We don't have any complaints about this workflow.

> Then once approved, we click the "squash and merge" button, and github squashes all that useless noise into a single commit on master for us.

This is not what squash is. I suggest you to read again the section "What squash merge actually is". tl;dr: "Squash merge is the same as the true merge but with a missing information: the reference to the merged branch."

> We don't have any complaints about this workflow.

Repeating the same answer: Just because you never had doesn't mean that they don't exist. If you saw it at least once, it means that it exists. I saw it once, and I related here: https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2024-06-27-squash-sub...

> Thank you, but no. I enjoy working on a branch and committing small changes at a time, sometimes trivial, sometimes not even compiling, sometimes formatting or whatever the hell I feel like. When it comes time to review, I squash all those trivial changes

I understand the workflow you've described here. I think the key word is "trivial". Otherwise, when I squash together many "large" patches, the end result will be a huge commit with possibly unrelated changes, and that can be really bad for code archeology. When the future me or someone else wants to revisit the history and try to understand why a change was made, it may be buried down a long list of changes in a single commit, and the commit message won't be able to proper explain the reasoning behind it, IMHO.

Something that I also quite like about having individual patches in a PR/MR, is being able to review them individually too. Makes it easier for me, as a reviewer, to be able to understand the motivations behind each set of changes. But then again, that may only apply for larger patchesets/PRs/MRs...

> Otherwise, when I squash together many "large" patches, the end result will be a huge commit with possibly unrelated changes

Of course not, that would be silly, but who is doing that? I suppose some silly outfits have long lived branches onto which they throw lots of stuff then finally go back to master, but that isn't what this article is arguing about. If I address PR comments, such as typos, simplifying logic etc, this is just noise that doesn't need to be in any history, except maybe for a deep dive by looking at the PR itself.

Yet the article seems to be arguing otherwise and suggesting we use tooling to solve a problem that we don't even have. As someone else said, it is such an engineering nitpick "you're using it wrong" type of article.

We enforce squash commits when we mere PRs to master, and we never have any issues with it.

> If I address PR comments, such as typos, simplifying logic etc, this is just noise that doesn't need to be in any history, except maybe for a deep dive by looking at the PR itself.

Read the rewriting tools references in the text.

> Yet the article seems to be arguing otherwise and suggesting we use tooling to solve a problem that we don't even have.

Read again about the debugging tools mentioned. I never saw a code that needed some kind of debugging. Keeping the history clean makes the debug easier.

You could also say the same about tests. Tests don't solve any problem as long as the code works. But if it doesn't work, test will help to quickly find out where it is broken.

Otherwise, you have no benefit of squashing. If you don't see the benefits of having a commit history, you can use Google Drive instead.

> We enforce squash commits when we mere PRs to master, and we never have any issues with it.

Just because you never had doesn't mean that they don't exist. If you saw it at least once, it means that it exists. I saw it once, and I related here: https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2024-06-27-squash-sub...

If you use short-lived branches and every PR is one indivisible unit that represents a change, then it will always end up as a single commit anyways. When this is the case, there's no point enforcing a high commig quality - just squashing them will produce the same end-result.

> The poor commit quality is your issue here, and squashing is merely a way to avoid addressing it.

Just like I said: it's like driving reverse because you don't want to learn how to shift gears!

> That only makes squashing a good tool to use to make a big mess a slightly smaller mess.

You're right, in cases that the repository is so cluttered this may be a palliative solution to avoid things to get worse. Squash exists, so it is a tool that can be used if you know what you're doing. But it being useful for rescuing in some situations doesn't mean that can be used in all situations. It's like taking pills instead of vaccines.

There are other tools in this category, such as git push -f: it is a useful tool that you may use when it's necessary if know what you're doing. This doesn't mean that it should be used as first option. Same for squash

Hi! Thanks for the comment!

> My experience has been the opposite. Every organization I worked at used Trunk based development (feature branch->master).

Each repository has its own necessities and you need to adapt the workflow to them. Sometimes for small repos what's work the best is commits on main, some people like the so-called "git flow", and Linux have different maintainers for each subsystem.

> Because branches are short lived and usually small, they are the atomic representation of a change, and not the commits in the pull request.

If they are small enough they can be a single commit. No problem in doing that, and the result will be similar to squashing. If they need more than one commit, so they are not exactly "small"

> Pull requests usually have lots of "linting", "fixing test", "fixing typo" commits that I absolutely do not want in my master branch.

I agree that if someone commits something and then commits a "lint", "fix typo", this could be solved in commit correctly once. But this is not always possible, so one can use the rewriting history tools that were mentioned.

But I return the question: what are the downsides of having those commits?

> Blanket statements like these are not productive.

What, exactly, was blank? I tried to justify everything that I could based on the how Git works and debunk statements like "squash makes the history cleaner" (which, in fact, are blank).

> just assumes that it's because people just don't understand how git works.

So, I make the same question of the text: after reading and knowing what squash merges really are, what are the good reasons to still use them?

> what are the downsides of having those commits?

In my experience, having to rebase on top of a branch with a lot of "lint" "quick fix" "let's try this" "oops, how about this" can be draining and sometimes lead to accidental code deletion.

I like squash merges because I know it was the author's intended change that I'm merging or rebasing onto.

Yup, agreed.

I've worked in orgs that use long lived branches and short lived branches... And short lived branches are by far less stressful to deal with if you can do it, precisely because of merge conflicts.

Reality is never going to match your desire. Things are going to get messy, and so you end up with squashable commits among your commits that shouldn't be squashed. The branch you're merging should match your intent for atomic changes to the code that can be easily reasoned about when rebasing, merging, and bisecting.

You write to history once, but you read from it many times. Therefore, optimize for reads.

> In my experience, having to rebase on top of a branch with a lot of "lint" "quick fix" "let's try this" "oops, how about this" can be draining and sometimes lead to accidental code deletion.

" But this is not always possible, so one can use the rewriting history tools that were mentioned."

> I like squash merges because I know it was the author's intended change that I'm merging or rebasing onto.

Can you elaborate, please?

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