4 ms·

>Seeing how the sausage was actually made, ... it is meaningful and will tell you a great deal about a project and its developers... I trust that. ...tidy comm

by jasode 11y ago

>Seeing how the sausage was actually made, ... it is meaningful and will tell you a great deal about a project and its developers... I trust that. ...tidy commits are aberrations and full of little lies... ...small, harmless lies. Interesting choice of words. Here's another way to think about squashing private commits for public consumption: programmers do not install keyloggers and upload their entire keystroke history including every Backspace and Ctrl+Z used in their text editor to the repositories. And, most of us wouldn't care about seeing it. Whether John typed "x = 218^H^H73" or "x = 273" is a meaningless distinction and irrelevant noise. Those spurious ^H Backspaces are equivalent to the twitchy multiple commits in private branches. We really don't want to see them. Think of private noisy commits as an extended workspace of a text editor. If squashing those commits is a lie, the Backspace key without an audited keystroke log is also a lie. Side note: The other comment downthread about keeping all private commit history for "git bisect" is a red herring. Sometimes a commit will deliberately have broken syntax -- e.g. make a quick commit before getting up to grab a soda -- it won't be CI test worthy. Besides, an automated CI server's cpu cycles can point to an upstream integration/test/qa branch instead of a programmer's private branch.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
side note: you're also a lie
WorldMaker 11y ago
«If squashing those commits is a lie, the Backspace key without an audited keystroke log is also a lie.» In a world with infinite storage space and a good UX on top of it, I could absolutely see a case where it might be amazing to have a source control integration with the full undo stack of my editors. VCR roll through someone's efforts Twitch style and grab a box of popcorn as you drinking game your way through their typos... That said, I definitely will rebase/squash local WIP stuff on local-only branches on my own machine, as I see fit. Yeah, I see those as harmless lies because I really didn't build it that way, but sometimes that's what makes me feel better about publishing that work. I appreciate you trying to push this conversation towards it's extreme, absurd ends, but I also realize that there are a lot of aesthetic judgments here and I for one lean towards keeping more of the little pieces and the interesting digressions like here's where I totally "brb grabbing a soda" the whole branch and sometimes you taking that break means easier commits for me to review when I'm reviewing your code (whether a code review in a PR immediately, or a research effort down the line) as maybe I need a review break there too. I appreciate not everyone feels the same on this topic.
- jasode 11y ago
  >you trying to push this conversation towards it's extreme, absurd ends, I didn't think of my example as absurd hyperbole. People actually do use "git commit" on their local unpublished branch as another form of Backspace/Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+S. And just like every text-editor Ctrl+S keystroke is not meaningful, every "git commit" is not meaningful either. A lot of commits are just the programmer's personal unhygienic work-in-progress scratchpad stuff. It's not CI or "git bisect" worthy. >I for one lean towards keeping more of the little pieces and the interesting digressions like here's where I totally "brb grabbing a soda" the whole branch I won't dispute that you like whatever you like (VCR-playback of every keystroke mistake) because we're all different. However, I'm pretty sure most busy programmers reviewing pull requests will not appreciate having to wade through all the commits about "cleaned up whitespace" and "savepoint before soda run."
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    I think it is hyperbole given the surrounding context of this article/thread is mostly speaking to squashing commits after a review has happened in a PR. I say that not as a judgment, I like hyperbole and admit my top-most comment was intentionally hyberbolic too. Hyberbole is a good conversation to have sometimes. A commit to git is a named snapshot of a file tree. That's it. All the other "worthiness" we ascribe to a commit is communal. A person's unhygienic work-in-progress can give you insight into their thought process or their work ethic. Why did this person give me this particular named snapshot of their file tree? I expect they are tell me (or future them) something and I can respect that artifact and preserve it, just as easily as you might angrily suffer from it and destroy it. CI or "git bisect" "worthy" are orthogonal considerations and also vary between communities and needs. If there is something we can agree on here: yes, all commits are not created equal. Even all commits aren't worth preserving equally. That said, I think there are tooling solutions here far beyond "destroy that what you dislike".
    - sulam 11y ago
      It's not destroyed, it's simply not on master. If you want to push that branch and have the history forever, that is an option.

by jasode 11y ago

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

side note: you're also a lie

WorldMaker 11y ago

«If squashing those commits is a lie, the Backspace key without an audited keystroke log is also a lie.» In a world with infinite storage space and a good UX on top of it, I could absolutely see a case where it might be amazing to have a source control integration with the full undo stack of my editors. VCR roll through someone's efforts Twitch style and grab a box of popcorn as you drinking game your way through their typos... That said, I definitely will rebase/squash local WIP stuff on local-only branches on my own machine, as I see fit. Yeah, I see those as harmless lies because I really didn't build it that way, but sometimes that's what makes me feel better about publishing that work. I appreciate you trying to push this conversation towards it's extreme, absurd ends, but I also realize that there are a lot of aesthetic judgments here and I for one lean towards keeping more of the little pieces and the interesting digressions like here's where I totally "brb grabbing a soda" the whole branch and sometimes you taking that break means easier commits for me to review when I'm reviewing your code (whether a code review in a PR immediately, or a research effort down the line) as maybe I need a review break there too. I appreciate not everyone feels the same on this topic.

jasode 11y ago
>you trying to push this conversation towards it's extreme, absurd ends, I didn't think of my example as absurd hyperbole. People actually do use "git commit" on their local unpublished branch as another form of Backspace/Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+S. And just like every text-editor Ctrl+S keystroke is not meaningful, every "git commit" is not meaningful either. A lot of commits are just the programmer's personal unhygienic work-in-progress scratchpad stuff. It's not CI or "git bisect" worthy. >I for one lean towards keeping more of the little pieces and the interesting digressions like here's where I totally "brb grabbing a soda" the whole branch I won't dispute that you like whatever you like (VCR-playback of every keystroke mistake) because we're all different. However, I'm pretty sure most busy programmers reviewing pull requests will not appreciate having to wade through all the commits about "cleaned up whitespace" and "savepoint before soda run."
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  I think it is hyperbole given the surrounding context of this article/thread is mostly speaking to squashing commits after a review has happened in a PR. I say that not as a judgment, I like hyperbole and admit my top-most comment was intentionally hyberbolic too. Hyberbole is a good conversation to have sometimes. A commit to git is a named snapshot of a file tree. That's it. All the other "worthiness" we ascribe to a commit is communal. A person's unhygienic work-in-progress can give you insight into their thought process or their work ethic. Why did this person give me this particular named snapshot of their file tree? I expect they are tell me (or future them) something and I can respect that artifact and preserve it, just as easily as you might angrily suffer from it and destroy it. CI or "git bisect" "worthy" are orthogonal considerations and also vary between communities and needs. If there is something we can agree on here: yes, all commits are not created equal. Even all commits aren't worth preserving equally. That said, I think there are tooling solutions here far beyond "destroy that what you dislike".
  - sulam 11y ago
    It's not destroyed, it's simply not on master. If you want to push that branch and have the history forever, that is an option.