You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save, but you can do literally anything, so what you can do is immaterial.
A push pushes commits and blobs and trees and tags. It’s an interesting metric to track, but the core unit of complexity (and expense) worth tracking on GitHub’s side is obviously the commit.
There’s a difference between pushing 1 commit and 100.
There isn’t much. GitHub doesn’t run actions separately for each commit. It runs them on pushes. I’m trying to think of a thing that would happen for each commit in each push and coming up blank.
It does things like scan for references to issues to index, but it would just scan the log for a range.
I did disagree with GP though because there is no reason to assume that the ratio of commits to pushes has materially changed. So if that is the proxy they have always used for measuring growth, and they know it reliably does that then I think it’s a reasonable way to communicate this to this audience.
Sure, because pushes are how you update a reference. That’s really what triggers an action: a reference changing. And there could be a bunch of those in a push.
A commit costs storage, you’ve got secret scanning, it needs to be indexed in a way that can be referenced in commit messages and comments, a commit message itself can close issues or reference other PRs, stored and served individually and immediately via the web UI or git clients, etc etc.
It’s also like… the core unit of git.
Secret scanning needs to make sure my repo as a whole has no secrets. It’s not acceptable to have 1 commit introducing it and 1 removing it because the secret is still recoverable.
Every commit is also surely an entry in a database somewhere. I can navigate in GitHub directly to any individual commit so there is definitely some overhead of some type.
> I can navigate in GitHub directly to any individual commit
You can do the same with the git command line client. The overhead you claim is already in the git on-disk format. Github might very well duplicate this information in a database somewhere, but it doesn't follow from your observation.
And yes, I agree there is indexing of commits, but that is a batch insert from a log.
The dev system we use for a 3rd party hosting provider (a big one) requires a commit and push for every file save while we're developing. I created a build system for this that copies the whole repo to a temp folder. As we save changes to files in the main repo folder, the build system watches for changes and copies the changed file to the temp folder, then does a commit on the temp folder and pushes to a an intermediary repo in github which then triggers an action that causes the 3rd party system to update from the intermediary repo. This way we don't pollute our main source repo with a commit every time we save an update to a source file.
It's not my favorite way to develop but it's caused us no real problems except when github goes down.
I don’t think I could imagine a stupider idea than this if I tried. To paraphrase Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a solution.