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Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

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Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#41

Post by maccard »

eptcyka wrote: post #8
aurelianito wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do. And it is frustrating. Specially frustrating when you ar the new guy and the history of the code does not tell what happened.

I don't think having a history full of "Fix the shaver, maybe yaks don't need 6mm trim" with subsequent "Fix shaver again, yaks need as low as a 3mm trim" with some more intermediate commits help understanding what happened either.

That's much better than looking at a file in a 300 file commit and seeing "merged from XXXX" with no information as to why that one line was changed. I'd much rather spend 30 seconds parsing through the 10 yak shaving commits than have to go trawling through old commits on a file to find the most likely owner of it to ping on slack.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#42

Post by lordnacho »

Joker_vD wrote: post #2

Do people out there actually squash commits? Granted, I didn't change many work places in my career, but at no place where I worked people squashed commits. What's even the point of it? It's not like people routinely read the commit history, and when they do, they really would like a complete story, not 20 gargantuan commits that contain 3 years of development.

The only time I ever do it is if it's trivial. Say I've removed some vestigial code, then I find some more after I've committed.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#43

Post by yipbub »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #7

If you use Pull Requests with squashed commits, you can do exactly the same process as described here by isolating the issue to a PR then restoring the branch and bisecting from there. It seems like a small price to pay for a clean history, given the rarity of occurrences like this.

Yeah, I'm happy I learned about `bisect` with this blog post, but I (almost) always make sure my squashed commits build.

However, I try to only squash into logical units, I don't try to cram the whole PR into one commit

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#44

Post by aequitas »

Joker_vD wrote: post #2

Do people out there actually squash commits? Granted, I didn't change many work places in my career, but at no place where I worked people squashed commits. What's even the point of it? It's not like people routinely read the commit history, and when they do, they really would like a complete story, not 20 gargantuan commits that contain 3 years of development.

Depends on the Git craftmanship of the team is my experience. If they commit every small fix with a useless commit message, history becomes messy real quick. Squashing can be seen as a solution here. Until you learn proper rewriting of history as in (interactive) rebasing. After which you can put you code changes in every commit you want and order them around as you see fit. But that also depends on the Git workflow that is used and how much branches are shared amongst team members.

I had one job in the past that used Gerrit[0] as Git tool. One of it's features is that it creates a "pullrequest" for every commit in the branch you push. Which needs to be reviewed individually. This is really anoying if you're used to organising your work in lot of commits to record each step of your developerment. But from a project's Git history perspective it makes a lot of sense. As every commit is 1 change, one feature, one contained unit, that is added to the main branch. So instead of the main branch now containing countless commits with each developers complete history on a specific feature (where code is added in one commit to be removed in the next) it contains the features as distict commits, making them easy to bisect and revert if needed. This looks a lot like squashing but because you do it before you push your code you learn to put much more thought into that single commit and the commit message.

[0] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#45

Post by davewritescode »

The reason to squash commits is more than just keeping your commit history read-able, it's about making easy to revert a feature and being able to keep history in a way that makes it simple to revert a change if you run into issues.

If I rollout a rewrite of an endpoint and run into a weird issue in the QA environment, I'm a simple git revert away from fixing the issue. If I had spread that endpoint across 25 commits, I'd have to actually debug the issue in QA and figure out what I broke. Reverting quickly lets me debug the issue on my time instead of keeping our test suite broken.

It's not always feasible, and I try not to be a stickler when people on my team don't do it but the fact is, if you're working in a world when you're delivery code quickly into real environments, having a back-out strategy is paramount.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#46

Post by saurik »

Joker_vD wrote: post #2

Do people out there actually squash commits? Granted, I didn't change many work places in my career, but at no place where I worked people squashed commits. What's even the point of it? It's not like people routinely read the commit history, and when they do, they really would like a complete story, not 20 gargantuan commits that contain 3 years of development.

I think what you really want is neither of squashing nor retaining: what you want is to take the messy history you had and then reconstruct a history that makes sense and commit that; thankfully, git makes this easy. I hate it when people leave messy thoughts in the commit history as I do use the history, and it is even worse if they just leave mega-commits. I want to see easy to review step by step organized thoughts designed to help the reader appreciate the series of steps needed to bring you from where you were to where you went.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#47

Post by craig_asp »

It really depends. I've seen developers commit tiny changes all the time, which do not make sense - I wouldn't want to trace a small logic change over 10 commits. Also, sometimes you commit, then realise that there's a stupid mistake you've made and then you fix it with another commit. In those cases it does make sense to squash the commits so that you get a normal, logical, commit in the history. On the other hand, squashing perfectly legit commits together into a horrendous single commit is a pretty bad practise for obvious reasons.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#48

Post by twic »

np_tedious wrote: post #27
Joker_vD wrote: post #2

Do people out there actually squash commits? Granted, I didn't change many work places in my career, but at no place where I worked people squashed commits. What's even the point of it? It's not like people routinely read the commit history, and when they do, they really would like a complete story, not 20 gargantuan commits that contain 3 years of development.

The argument for squashing is that minor updates like spelling, renaming, or test fixes during initial development can really clutter the history if they each have a commit. Many would rather see the actual change "Update X to use Y instead of Z" in the history, and minor details like "Fix mock in XTestCase" or "Perform renames from code review" within that single commit. I'm sort of agnostic on this issue, but I do…

For me, it's the other way round: minor updates like spelling, renaming, or test fixes during initial development can really clutter the major updates.

If i am making a commit that makes a complex but important change to some significant application logic, i want that commit to contain that change and only that change, so that when i have to re-read it a year later, it's completely obvious what i did and why. Bundling a load of refactoring and cleanup in there is a significant speedbump for my understanding.

Years ago, a sage pointed out the argument for squashing is really an argument for better tools. Imagine if you could flag commits as being of two types - major/minor, significant/insignificant, feature/refactoring, foreground/background, melody/rhythm, etc. Then imagine if the tools would by default hide, roll up, or otherwise de-emphasise the commits of the latter kind. This whole apparent dichotomy would go away in a flash.

This idea is floating around in the Wiki world. I believe it was Ward's Wiki that introduced a 'minor edit' checkbox in the editor; if a change was marked as a minor edit, it wouldn't be show on the recent changes feed.

You can imagine other ways to get somewhere similar. For example, you could have a special kind of commit that just groups a previous run of commits, and the tools could show that and hide the members of the group by default. There are probably many other ways to do this.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#49

Post by adrianN »

jdmoreira wrote: post #35
Joker_vD wrote: post #2

Do people out there actually squash commits? Granted, I didn't change many work places in my career, but at no place where I worked people squashed commits. What's even the point of it? It's not like people routinely read the commit history, and when they do, they really would like a complete story, not 20 gargantuan commits that contain 3 years of development.

I religiously squash my commits for each merged pull request. I seems like madness any other way to me... why have a bigger granularity than a single merge commit?

Granularity helps with bisecting issues.

Re: Fortunately, I don't squash my commits

#50

Post by Droobfest »

aurelianito wrote: post #29
fs111 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merge commits are noise, a clean history is has no merge commits

If you squash all the merge requests, you get ONLY merge commits.

They can both be pretty useful. So keep all commits and decide upon viewing the log which ones you really want to see.
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