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Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

I think "every PR should be a single commit when merged" is a bit too dogmatic. If the PR is logically split up into bits of work that conceptually separate and that compile/run independently, then it makes sense to have those as separate commits. You might argue that those should then be separate PRs, but that's going a bit too far, I think. You can still revert it, it's just have to revert the individual commits and squash the revert commits.

IMHO the guideline should be "clean up your branch and rebase it before merging. Usually that means a single commit, but it can be multiple if that makes more sense to <future person> reading the history".

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> IMHO the guideline should be "clean up your branch and rebase it before merging

In my experience, engineers tend to fall into 1 of 2 camps: 'Deep' Git knowledge who routinely dig through reflog and keep backup branches, commit early/often and autosquash logcal chunks until their PRs tell a Story through their commit history. The other side pretends git is p4; and has no concept of fetch vs pull vs rebase. A base assumption that branches are expensive and to be avoided.

I'd like to think probably fall in the middle, but nearly every engineer I've worked with falls on those edges based on the number of DMs i get asking for help after after the rote `git stash; git pull; git stash pop` throws conflict.

My local git copy can be a mess of branch and commits. But I want the main copy to have a clean history that embodies the project. Which means having only the main branch and a few others that represent main activities in flight, each changes can be tied to a ticket, a task, and people, and easily manage releases and reversions.

What’s that got to do with this squash sub-topic?

Individuals who don’t care and prefer squash can still use the squash option for their own work. The option is there in the $forge PR menu. No git(1) required.

The problem with the squash strategy is when it is used as a team-wide policy. Like it was described here. I can’t understand why we have to collectively limit ourselves like that.

I don’t see it as too dogmatic. I see it as taking the ambiguity out of the decision whether to squash or not. Just always squash into master. There are plenty of options to make creating PRs more lightweight.

Another nice thing with squashing is that merges into master always look the same regardless of individual engineer workflows.

Any dogmatic decision could be described as taking the ambiguity out of decisions.

Sure. And that’s positive in the context of this thread.

We’ve discussed the downsides of having such a policy in this subthread.

I want to have the choice to do a true merge or some other strategy. It’s a downside for me personally. Not having a choice doesn’t help me since it’s a meaningful choice in my book.

As a policy. I leave this decision for others. People who prefer can squash-merge all the time if they want to.

That’s when you introduce feature branch if the work is going to take days or months to get right. That feature branch will be the target of these PRs. Then you either merge (if you want the history) or squash if you don’t

Everyone knows what a feature branch is. Even people who choose to not use them.

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