Same. Do whatever you want in your feature branch, what matters is the Files list and the description in the PR. The whole thing gets squashed into a single commit anyway (which also makes reverting much easier).
2. have not very disjunct PRs (sometimes for e.g. legacy maintenance projects you mostly have disjunct PRs normaly you do not)
then you need stacked PRs for productivity, i.e. you need to be able to continue working on a new PR based on the old PR before that is fully merged (or reviwed).
In this case in my experience three workflow work:
1. you (may) squash commits, and rebase stacked PRs once the previous PR has been merged (or sometimes majorly modified, but that quite advanced rebase usage). This works but has some major pain points: 1) rebased during reviews are terrible bad handled by github, 2) git doesn't keep track of the original start of a branch, this can lead to issues if you squash the commits when merging, 3) no good build in tooling for it
2. All forms of history manipulation are forbidden including rebasing and squashing. It's merge only because of this git doesn't get confused when merging squashed commits and everything seems fine... Until you now realize that follow up changes from reviews of a parent PR happen in the git history chronologically after your follow up PR and that can be a total pain depending on what changes. (Through you are allowed to fully rebase your history before marking a PR as ready for review so as long as the "stack" of PRs isn't too deep it's fine).
3. you agree with Linus that github PRs have major issues and go with a patch based approach for merging, now you need completely different tooling which often less nice modern UI but id doesn't have any of the issues of point 1 or 2
It's was quite a wtf are you doing industry moment when I realized that the most widely used contributions flows (weather in open source or in companies) are either quite flawed (1&2), productivity nightmares (no stacked commits) or quite inconvenient (3).
don't know why, but recent teams around me have always made strict rules about number of commits in PRs. I just wanted to tell them the same thing you said: "Why don't you just look at the diffs?" curious for other opinions. (sorry not really about this particular topic)
I prefer to have clear commits that tell a tidy story. For example:
* Refactor function `foo` to accept a second parameter
* Add function `bar`
* Use `bar` and `foo` in component `Baz` to implement feature #X
If you give me a commit history like this, I can easily validate that each step in your claimed process does what you describe.
If you instead give me a messy history and ask me to read the diff, you might know that the change to file `Something.ts` on line 125 was conceptually part of the refactor to `foo`, but I'll have to piece that together myself. It's not obvious to the person who didn't write the code what the purpose of any given change was supposed to be.
This isn't a huge deal if your team's process is such that each step above is a PR on its own, but if your PRs are at the coarseness of a full feature, it's helpful to break down the sub-steps into smaller (but sane and readable) diffs.
This is reasonable, but the problem I encounter is how stifling it seems to ask others to structure their work so specifically. By way of comparison, getting compliance on conventional commit messages is a challenge, and that's an appreciably smaller ask than this.
Funny that two of your commits don't actually tell us why they exist, one simply describes the diff (which you should never need lol?) and the other proxies that responsibility to some other system.
You could have simply randomized the text in each commit, put the ticket id and the one "why" in the merge commit body and gotten the same end result amount of real information in the end.
The first line of the commit message isn't about including information that couldn't be gleaned from the commit. That can be done in subsequent lines. The first line is for two purposes:
* Priming the reader so they are able to quickly interpret what they're seeing when they open the commit.
* Making it easy to search or scan for a specific change.
The last commit message in my example would probably have included the name of the feature as well as the ticket number, but I couldn't be bothered to invent an actual feature name.
DRY doesn't really apply to technical writing, at least not as extremely as you seem to think it should. Headings are supposed to summarize the contents, and that's what commit messages are: headings.
> Instead of "priming the reader" it's infinitely more helpful to tell the reader why you did something, because you can't extract that from a diff.
Again, that can go in the PR body or in subsequent lines. You have ~50 characters in that first line, which is never going to be enough to fully explain anything.
I'm also not suggesting that you eliminate the PR body: that should also include more context. All I'm suggesting is that taking the trouble to organize your commits into discrete units helps reviewers to understand how you perceive the various changes in a single PR as being related to one another, and no amount of text in the PR body will provide the same benefit as being able to look at several distinct diffs containing related changes.
In the context of Github PR you can’t leave reviews on commits other than what’s currently the tip commit of the pr branch so structuring this way is just wasted effort.
What you should be doing is breaking down PRs more finely so that your unrelated refactors are all separate single-commit PRs. That ofc requires that your pr review round trip time is fast
I'm pretty sure I've left comments on a commit before in a GitHub PR. The comment just goes in the right place in the PR diff, assuming no changes, or comments can actually be attached to commits themselves (which is what happens when a comment becomes stale—it retains a reference to the original commit).
A good practice is to rebase your commits before creating a PR into a single commit. You are free to commit as many times as you want to while doing your work. This minimizes the noise in the log.
> Commit and push often. Put a novel explaining yourself in the PR. And that's enough IMO.
Someone reading the git changelog 5 years down the line most likely wouldn't be able to find your "novel" in the PR and definitely won't appreciate if instead of a "novel" you ended up with a "short call" with the assigned reviewer explained what you actually did in your 50 "wip" commits.
You do you but, at the point of publishing a branch for review, I'd insist the changes are presented as a story, with well-written commit messages that helps the reader/reviewer orient themselves and presents a coherent narrative.
Anthing else, I call it a landfill site, not a maintained repository.
In fact, I'd go as far as using their commit habit as a measure of a candidate's consideration for their colleagues.
I don't know why people are obsessed with squash merging. I always rebase (when needed) to preserve commit history. It's a good best practice, and makes it easier to spot errors after fixing conflicts.
I suspect squashers use the wrong tools. Use source tree, or, if you are on linux, smartgit. You can see a detailed log, which makes it much easier.
But then when you're done, turn it into a series of patches for a reviewer to read. In the words of Greg Kroah-Hartman, "pretend I'm your math teacher and show your working".
In a maths assignment, you spend ages making a big mess on a scrap of paper. Then when you've got the solution, you list the steps nice and clearly for the teacher as if you got it right first time. In software development, if you're not a dick, you do the same. You make a big old mess with loads of commits, then when you're done and it's review time, you turn it into a series of tidy commits that are easy for someone to review one-by-one.
Why on Earth did people flag this? Indeed, you won't have a good time sending series of 50 "wip" commits to any kernel mailing list. Having a good split with proper commit messages and cover letter will both make your code much easier to understand for current reviewers and any future "code archeologist" who will have to fix bug in that code 10 years down the line.
Am I living in a bubble and all the glorified 500k TC FAANG devs from HN really routinely submit a changes consisting of a tangled mess of 50 "wip" commits for their code review without any repercussions?
Commit and commit often, but then clean up the history into discrete, readable chunks.
If your PRs are tiny it's not a big deal, but with 190 files changed in this one, it absolutely should have been rebased into a more reasonable commit history.
He mentions it in the video. They couldn't rely on Elm, which was too young at the time, for their migration away from Flash. The scale of creating a language was too big for Prezi's immediate needs back then
I went to a JS conference at the time and the CTO of Prezi was talking to me about compiling Haskell to JS; he really wanted Haskell. I told him the performance won’t be good. He wasn’t happy with that answer, but I saw in the end that they went with Elm.
