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Comment by focom | Hacker News Reader

Commit message should be ephemeral too. Squashing after a PR should be the default. Only at that moment does the PR/Commit message matter.

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Hard disagree here. GitHub does encourage this sort of thing, but even there for my PRs to be easily reviewable, I like to keep my commits organized and with good messages explaining things. That way the reviewer can walk the commits, and see why each thing was thing was done.

I also like it for myself, when I’m going over my own PRs before asking for a review - I will often amend commits to ensure the work is broken down correctly, each thing that should go together, does.

In a way, stacked PRs are just a higher-level abstraction of this too - same idea, keep work that goes together in the same place.

Fully agree with you here. Blunt squashing is a bandaid to the problem of lazy commits. Commits should IMHO be specific and atomic. Like fixing one bug or implementing one feature. Obviously there are cases where this ideal isn't practical, but the answer is still not squash everything, it's to think for 10 more seconds about the commit and do your best.

Yeah, I think over use of GitHub, which seems to encourage squash-merging, has led to this where a lot of people I’ve seen treat a PR as essentially one commit - because it ends up being one in the end.

If you keep your PRs small I guess the end result is the same, but even then I like things in individual commits for ease of review.

I want to see detailed atomic commits during PR review, and once it's reviewed I'm happy to have it squashed. If the PR produces so much code/changes that main branch needs detailed atomic commits for future reference, then the PR was too large to begin with, imo.

I do agree that this is a good compromise. For me, if I do a git blame and eventually can find the PR that led to change, if it has nice clean commits, that’s good enough.

> If you keep your PRs small

Its not a if. it's necessary for the sake of people reviewing your code. Unless you work alone on your pet project and always push to master you never work alone.

Right, small PRs are great. And they are even better with a nice commit history for me to follow. One does not exclude the other.

Did you mean before the PR? Why would anyone have a review system if you change the code after review?

Hopefully the commits are already squashed and rebased before review to value reviewers' time.

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