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Your commit history should be readable like your code and your tests. It's part of the final product you deliver to the rest of your team. It's easy to forget o

Your commit history should be readable like your code and your tests. It's part of the final product you deliver to the rest of your team. It's easy to forget or ignore your commit history, which is probably what leads people to encouraging squashing all commits in a PR. Ugly commit history is a code smell. I agree with the OP that it's a bad blanket policy. We are fortunate that git has powerful abilities to edit commit history (git rebase -i is my favorite). Rather than just requiring everything to be squashed as a matter of policy, maintainers should instead request that commit history be cleaned up if it's not presentable, IMO.

newjersey 10y ago
> Your commit history should be readable like your code and your tests. It's part of the final product you deliver to the rest of your team. It's easy to forget or ignore your commit history, which is probably what leads people to encouraging squashing all commits in a PR. Ugly commit history is a code smell. > I agree with the OP that it's a bad blanket policy. We are fortunate that git has powerful abilities to edit commit history (git rebase -i is my favorite). Rather than just requiring everything to be squashed as a matter of policy, maintainers should instead request that commit history be cleaned up if it's not presentable, IMO. For what it is worth, I think history is sacred. Never rewrite history (except in extraordinary circumstances and that too very rarely). Of course, do whatever you want on your local machine before pushing to remote but once you have pushed, stop worrying about it.
- ereyes01 10y ago
  > Of course, do whatever you want on your local machine before pushing to remote but once you have pushed, stop worrying about it. This is what I'm talking about. After you push and share with others, I think you are absolutely right. Before it leaves your computer via git push to a shared location, I advocate that you should tidy things up. Thanks for clarifying...

newjersey 10y ago

> Your commit history should be readable like your code and your tests. It's part of the final product you deliver to the rest of your team. It's easy to forget or ignore your commit history, which is probably what leads people to encouraging squashing all commits in a PR. Ugly commit history is a code smell. > I agree with the OP that it's a bad blanket policy. We are fortunate that git has powerful abilities to edit commit history (git rebase -i is my favorite). Rather than just requiring everything to be squashed as a matter of policy, maintainers should instead request that commit history be cleaned up if it's not presentable, IMO. For what it is worth, I think history is sacred. Never rewrite history (except in extraordinary circumstances and that too very rarely). Of course, do whatever you want on your local machine before pushing to remote but once you have pushed, stop worrying about it.

ereyes01 10y ago
> Of course, do whatever you want on your local machine before pushing to remote but once you have pushed, stop worrying about it. This is what I'm talking about. After you push and share with others, I think you are absolutely right. Before it leaves your computer via git push to a shared location, I advocate that you should tidy things up. Thanks for clarifying...