PRs are emails to your team and to your future self.
Framed in that context it's easier to carry the correct tone and think about scoping / what's important.
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> pedantically apply DRY to every situation
I swear DRY has done more damage to the software industry from the developer side than it has done good because it has manifested into this big stick with which to bludgeon people without taking context into account.
This should be commits though. Typically, developers would look for clues in this order:
code -> code comment -> commit message -> PR text -> external document
So commit messages puts the information closer to the user. One hop doesn't seem much, but the time saved adds up as you go.
Also, as some other reader mentioned anecdotally, PRs may not be there forever. E.g. your team may migrate to a new platform PR text and reviews were left behind.
If you decide to do merges without squashing, then yes, you gotta have to have more hygiene on each individual commit. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction and it's guaranteed to be slower (devs can't use commits as checkpoints/savepoints on their work, but rather each commit becomes a fully fleshed out "intermediate final state"). The only situation where I see this making sense is if you share work on a branch with other engineers (which is also a bad idea).
But they can! In git you can do whatever you want with your local/remote working branch. And after you're done it's pretty straightforward to massage it into a coherent series of commits (especially if you had been working with that in mind).
> each commit becomes a fully fleshed out "intermediate final state"
This is really a team decision. You can allow intermediate commits to e.g. fail the tests, and add a tag to your main/master after each merge. Then you know that only the tagged commits are guaranteed to be fully functional.
Why waste time? Just squash and merge, you have a single commit and it WORKS. Intermediate messages disappear and you have a single, atomic rollback point on your main branch
> You can allow intermediate commits to e.g. fail the tests, and add a tag to your main/master after each merge. Then you know that only the tagged commits are guaranteed to be fully functional.
OR… squash and merge. Block merging with tests and compilation passing
For anything in tech, there’s the frictionless way and the busywork way. Both of your examples are busywork that’s completely unnecessary if you just… squash and merge
The best process is the process nobody needs to remember to do shit for it to work
You always have the PR discussion to refer to, until you move to a different platform to cut costs.
You can always ask the author of the code, until they have left the company.
Everywhere I've worked the past few years squashes PRs on merge with the PR becoming the commit title + message so the context lives on in the git history.
Indeed! I've found many point on this discussion answered by the linux kernel idea of mailing lists where a change is discussed then approved, often with feedback acknowledged