20 ms·

Two Years of Squash Merge (2019)

• gouggoug 5y ago
  I will always fight tooth and nail against squash merge. Squash merge has the major disadvantage of getting rid of valuable meaningful git history. Squash merge is not the proper solution for keeping your git history clean, it is a hack using the side effect of squash. Keeping your git history clean is a matter of policy, best-practices and education: Developers should be required to submit _clean_ PRs, that is, PR's whose git history has been organized and refactored in such a way that it removed "clean up commits", "typo fix", etc. When you squash merge a feature branch that has thousands of lines of code, and 6 months later you have a bug introduced by this feature branch, it becomes extremely hard to find which line introduced the bug. On the other hand, if you kept the history, and if this history was clean from the get go, it becomes easy to read the commits one-by-one and understand the issue. Don't use squash+merge. edit: I see numerous comment saying, in essence, "squash+merge" is what gets rid of the dirty history. No, developers must learn the existence of `git rebase --interactive`, which is the command to use to clean your git history[0]. "squash" is one possible action, among others, that helps cleaning the history. [0]: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rewriting-History https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rewriting-History
  • calpaterson 5y ago
    > Developers should be required to submit _clean_ PRs, that is, PR's whose git history has been organized and refactored in such a way that it removed "clean up commits", "typo fix", etc. A complete and utter waste of time. You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems. When you're digging through VCS history due to a bug you often ignore the commit message anyway - if the code did what it seemed to do you wouldn't be there.
    • preordained 5y ago
      Could not agree more...I wish I had more of substance to add, but an upvote didn't feel sufficient
    • qudat 5y ago
      Agreed but I also think this depends heavily on context. If the organization cares a lot of clean commit messages, have a nice git history, and want PRs to be submitted in a clean state, great! This is not always the case. I've worked on codebases where we rarely scan the git history messages for anything useful, it's just as easy for us to dig into the code to figure out what's wrong.
    • dyeje 5y ago
      It's a prime example of engineers mistaking aesthetics for utility.
    • tablespoon 5y ago
      > A complete and utter waste of time. You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems. Eh. Not really. A clean history is a good resource for figuring out what was changed and why. Cleaning up history isn't even that much work anyway. > When you're digging through VCS history due to a bug you often ignore the commit message anyway - if the code did what it seemed to do you wouldn't be there. Only if the commit messages are shitty, which unfortunately they often are. I try to summarize what I'm changing and what I indent those changes to accomplish, because if there's one thing I hate doing, it's spending more time than necessary to puzzle out what I (or a coworker) was thinking at the time. VCS history can be a pretty powerful tool, but a messy history discourages the use of it.
      • hbogert 5y ago
        amen! really, do people even use git bisect? If you do, you go through some rite of passage and I've seen people including myself make better (not perfect) commits. It remains a black art to gauge what the perfect amount of work in a commit should be.
    • throwaway1777 5y ago
      Strongly disagree. Mainline branch commit history should be clean atomic commits that you can roll back. Otherwise you are just asking for trouble on any merge conflict or hotfix scenario.
    • pizza234 5y ago
      > A complete and utter waste of time. You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems. I'm also one of those "micro committers". Because of this attitude, many hundreds pedantic commit rebases after, I'm now a better programmer (and I also spend next to no time with that type of rebases). This is because I have now a much higher capacity (and speed) of breaking down problems into smaller, self-contained, steps. There is a common understanding that VCs are just storages. VCs actually map the mental model of the developer. Having a precise, clear, granular VC history has a bidirectional relationship with being a precise, granular, clear developer.
    • mrkeen 5y ago
      > You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems Rebase should be quick and straightforward. If it's not, you've got bigger problems. By rebasing, you're taking responsibility for changing the codebase as it exists now, rather than how it used to be.
    • sebastialonso 5y ago
      I think I'm missing something here. How valuable is to have 20 commits of "fix this error" , "fix the fix of the error", "revert all fixes", "real fix".... etc? I'd argue a PR with many commits such as these, conveys little no no useful information, when the actual change is 1-3 LOC. what about cleaning and filtering out useless commits, by soft reseting the branch and commiting just the actual changes to merge. Sure, it can take a lot of time, but it's done once, by you, after all you're supplying the changes. And if it takes a really long time, you're doing it wrong in the first place by submitting PRs with many LOC. Have you tried rebasing branches with dozens of short useless commits? That's a real waste of time, and everyone needs to do this if you want to update your main branch. So you've now multiplied the amount of wasted time for everyone.
      • darknavi 5y ago
        > what about cleaning and filtering out useless commits, by soft reseting the branch and commiting just the actual changes to merge. So... squashing?
        • phone8675309 5y ago
          Yes, but the author of the code, who would presumably know their intent, gets to choose how many commits to squash to instead of just one. This means that they can preserve the development process in a logical way.
        • u801e 5y ago
          What if the change really should be split into multiple commits. Having a mega commit affecting hundreds of lines across tens of files doesn't make reviewing the change easy, and reverting it will result in conflicts.
          • Seb-C 5y ago
            I would ask such changes to be split into multiple independent PRs
    • thom 5y ago
      Do people here have examples of some bugs for which they had to resort to VCS history to find the cause? I'm struggling to picture a single bug in my whole career where this would have been quicker than just following the logic of the code. If there's information in commit messages that isn't evident in the code itself, that seems a terrible way to live.
      • pizza234 5y ago
        As wrote in another comment, bisecting (which is for me a significant tool) relies on history (specifically, a granular one). However, it also must a disciplined history.
        • thom 5y ago
          What's an example of a bug you've had to bisect for recently? Forgive me, it just seems like such a last resort thing.
          • LocalPCGuy 5y ago
            I don't bisect regularly, but when I do, it's usually trying to figure out what the original reason for introducing the code that is problematic is. The entire point is on projects big enough, you may not be able to just "follow the logic" enough to know that your fix the to apparent bug isn't re-introducing some regression that was fixed previously. So bisect to me, is a way to figure out where and why the code was changed the way that it was, so I have a better understanding of the changes I can make going forward. That doesn't mean the change made in the past was correct and must be maintained (obviously something is broken), or that it might be that the obvious solution based on following the code logic is correct. But that doesn't mean I wasted time making sure I best understand the reasoning behind the changes made. But this is also why I don't resort to it very often, because it isn't necessary in all cases (I'd even say it isn't necessary in most cases). Bisect also allows you to see other changes made in the commit in question, and around that commit, so you get a better overall picture of the logic.
            • 5y ago
    • Rapzid 5y ago
      I agree with you in part, depending on the project, if that means just squashing it down first. This at least can keep the integration branch somewhat sane and without a bunch of intermediate commits that are junk and won't build. For this reason I prefer people to rebase on the integration branch instead of merging it in to stay current; unless there is a reason not to. And a lot of open source projects require PRs that to be pre-squashed or be able to be squashed before merging! However, there is a time and place still for deliberately crafting the PR commits. For instance if you are wanting the reviewer to be able to review chunks of the PR in isolation/stages, or if you want each of the commits to be buildable.. I suppose also for review/testing. This all depends on the project and other factors like the wider org.
    • gregmac 5y ago
      > A complete and utter waste of time. You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems. Unless you're using a garbage client (eg, the git CLI) a rebase to get rid of the "typo" "oops" type commits (when you forgot something) takes I'd say 10-20 seconds. Most commonly I do this when I have several changes on the go at once and forget to commit a fixed unit test, new import, or something like that. I usually realize it right away, so my commit will usually be "add test" or "amend 2 commits ago" or something to remind myself which one it goes to (and it sticks out, because my other commits are usually in the format "PROJ-1234: Add new --host command-line option"). > When you're digging through VCS history due to a bug you often ignore the commit message anyway - if the code did what it seemed to do you wouldn't be there. I presume this is doing a bisect or something to narrow down where a bug was introduced? My experience comes from the opposite side. Usually I identify the line of code causing a bug, it makes me go "wtf, what is this even supposed to be doing?" so I do a git blame. Hopefully the commit message is useful and ideally leads me back to the original bug/ticket, so I can figure out what the original intent/fix was, rather than inadvertently breaking something (or re-causing a different bug it fixed). I'll also note that in code that is well-commented and well-tested, this step is rarely necessary. As an example, say I come across something like this: if (port > 443) ignoreErrors = true; Clearly, this was added to solve some some problem, but even without any context it's pretty obviously a bad solution to whatever that problem is. Git blame lets me go back to see what the original reason/bug was, evaluate if it's still relevant and then either fix it properly or safely remove this line.
      • FalconSensei 5y ago
        > My experience comes from the opposite side. Usually I identify the line of code causing a bug, it makes me go "wtf, what is this even supposed to be doing?" so I do a git blame. If the commit message is something like: PROJECT-TICKETNUMBER Description, you can you know... see the ticket/issue along with full details and discussions?
      • sethherr 5y ago
        > I'll also note that in code that is well-commented and well-tested, this step is rarely necessary. This is the most important line from this comment. If I'm using blame or bisect, it means I did something wrong. I merge 10 times a day - and if it takes me a minute, because I'm slower than you - that means it's ten minutes a day. Add the cognitive load of the whole process and the added time of explaining it to other team members - 10 minutes is an underestimate. I'm going to spend that time writing tests and comments, since even you note that they're the better option. Squash is good enough. I spend my energy improving the right things.
    • globular-toast 5y ago
      > A complete and utter waste of time. You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems. You won't think that when customers report a regression that was introduced some time in the last year.
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      You have apparently never had the benefit of a properly run git repository. Our master has straight history. We always rebase to merge a PR and we have build scripts that check this as well. You will not be able to merge a PR that tries to get more than one commit onto master, if the commits touch more than one of the modules (we have a monorepo with lots of individual services). Until the PR has been approved we leave individual commits on the branch though as that can be helpful. I have not had to "mess" with rebases ever. Most rebases apply cleanly and if they don't the conflict resolution is mostly very easy. The 'hardest' conflicts to solve were actually in the end the easiest to solve, because all you had to do was to `git rebase --skip` the appropriate commits. Of course some developers that didn't know better spent hours trying to do those conflict resolutions and complained loudly. Fortunately they were that loud, so we caught it and just did the skipping. Everything applied cleanly without any conflicts after that. It's pretty awesome to have one commit per ticket on master and especially if something goes wrong. I can easily `git bisect` to find which ticket introduced a bug or a regression and I don't ever have to mess around. All commits have to have a ticket number in the commit message. It also enables firefighters to almost mechanically solve production issues. Prod is broken after the last production deploy? There's very very likely only one new commit since the last deploy before that (or maybe a few). In any case, just revert to the commit of the previous deploy, lock down the deployments and now you have time to properly solve the issue without time pressure. If there was more than one commit and you can pinpoint which of them caused the issue it would even be very easy to just revert that one commit and let deployments continue. No dealing with 27 commits that make up one ticket. Know thy tools!
      • u801e 5y ago
        > You will not be able to merge a PR that tries to get more than one commit onto master What value does the merge commit in the PR provide if a PR only has a single commit? Couldn't you essentially halve the number of commits in the commit history by amending the single PR commit message to contain the text that the merge commit will contain anyway?
        • tharkun__ 5y ago
          In case it wasn't clear from my post, I am very all over the place with the word 'merge'. I usually use it to describe the concept. We don't ever have actual merge commits. We merge by rebasing and that then makes the 'merge' just a fast forward.
    • u801e 5y ago
      > A complete and utter waste of time. You spend more time messing about with rebase than solving problems. That can be avoided by only staging and committing changes when the change is actually completely implemented. For example, I'll make a change and then I'll stage it as follows: 1. Stage and commit a new method and associated unit tests 2. Stage and commit calls to the new method 3. Stage and commit the version update Having to go through extensive rebasing is really an issue with treating version control as a back up system rather than a way to record individual units of work with well crafted commit messages that describe what and why the change was made.
  • edoceo 5y ago
    maybe its not 100% one way or the other? I love squash for somethings, but not others today I brought in one big merge, 20+ commits , so don't squash it. but I also have 20 "little fix" branches, with 1,2 commits each which I merge all together and squash in as one merge to main.
    • sevencolors 5y ago
      This is exactly how i run my project. Amazing that folks get into these "two sides" debate. The reality is always a grey area. And you should be flexible enough to see the benefits of the different variations. With some guidelines on how to make a decision.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      hah, a big merge. in the next month or so, i will need to merge a branch with nearly 500 commits that change more that 15k lines of code, under development for more than a year. but yeah, like your "one big merge", i do not intend to squash it (though there are actually some arguments in favor that only kick on with a merge of this size).
      • tharkun__ 5y ago
        I would argue that this feature branch of yours is way too long lived :) But I get it, sometimes you can't change some things in a corporate environment. I would like to know though, if those 500 commits are all individual PRs/tickets that originally might have been 3798 commits but each PR that got merged into the feature branch was squashed? Or are these 500 individual commits that are potentially interleaved, meaning commit #246 is for ticket ABC, commit #247 to #251 is ticket XYZ, #252 to #255 is ticket ABC again etc.? I'm basically re-commenting here but I think if the 500 commits are commits that if you didn't have to have a long-lived feature branch for some reason you would've made those exact 500 commit to master using squash-merge, then it's fine to rebase the feature branch on master and do a fast-forward 'merge' that makes all of those 500 commits suddenly appear on master (find except for the fact that you had _one year_ feature branch :))
  • eximius 5y ago
    If only there was a way to have our cake and eat it too. I'm assuming there is because I'm assuming those squashed commits are floating somewhere in the reflog and somehow connected to the squashed commits in a way that should still let you bisect if only we had a tool to make it not suck. Alas, maybe someone with greater git-fu can inform us.
    • waffletower 5y ago
      There are, as I answered separately: `git log -p --first-parent`
    • rubyist5eva 5y ago
      In the article he says he keeps the original branch with all of the history around after they squash them with a reference to the original PR in the squashed merge commit message. So you can always just checkout the original branch and go digging in the full history.
      • waffletower 5y ago
        Unwieldy to keep branches around even on moderate sized teams/projects. You don't need them to have a `squashed` view of history when needed. I am surprised that developers still cling to this outdated squashing regimen when pull request tools found on github, gitlab, bitbucket etc. already provide synthetic squash views derived from atomic commits by default.
        • rubyist5eva 5y ago
          How is it unwieldy? They don't even show up locally when you `git branch` unless you've checked them out. Otherwise they just sit there doing nothing, there is literally no maintenance required on them once they've been squashed into mainline. Most central repositories end up having hundreds (or even thousands) of "finished" branches that nobody ever looks at anyway.
          • waffletower 5y ago
  • scott0129 5y ago
    I would agree with your points if not for the fact that "clean up commits" or "typo fix" is a necessary result of PR's. Your teammate will request changes in your code, and the only way to cleanly communicate "yes I made that change, and ONLY that change" is through these clean-up commits. Otherwise, if you amend/force-push or open an entirely new PR, 99% of the diff are things that your team has already seen and reviewed. Squash merges let you clearly communicate how you addressed PR comments, while also keeping the master history clean.
    • jcelerier 5y ago
      > Otherwise, if you amend/force-push or open an entirely new PR, 99% of the diff are things that your team has already seen and reviewed. gerrit has solved this issue for years by showing the diffs between each successive revision of a patch. e.g. look here the files at different origin patchsets : https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwayland/+/321246/3..6 https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwayland/+/321246/3....
      • jonhohle 5y ago
        This was a feature of ReviewBoard as well. The history of code review changes was maintained by the tool separately from commit history.
      • pjc50 5y ago
        It took me a while to get a workflow that actually works with Gerrit, and I occasionally think of trying to do some kind of autosquash so I can have successive commits locally. In practice I just use --amend all the time. Careful use of setting upstream and of course pull=rebase makes keeping up with trunk manageable.
      • servilio 5y ago
        You can also use git-range-diff[1]. [1] http://git-scm.com/docs/git-range-diff http://git-scm.com/docs/git-range-diff
        • 5y ago
  • ginja 5y ago
    I do agree that PRs should have a clean history. However: - Services like GitHub allow you to restore the original branch, so you never actually lose history. So I don't see any major drawbacks of squashing on merge. - If your PRs are several thousand lines long, they probably should've been broken up into multiple PRs (your reviewer will appreciate it)
    • finnh 5y ago
      Spot-on for both counts. Preserving a PR's individual commits in the master branch is insane - many of those commits won't represent a fully working system anyway, so why keep them in master?
      • sjoruk 5y ago
        > many of those commits won't represent a fully working system anyway This is entirely within the control of the developer(s) working on the project. Whether it's worth it is up to the people working on it. It's certainly not insane though - it's much easier to fix merge/rebase conflicts when each commit is small and easy to reason about.
        • finnh 5y ago
          > it's much easier to fix merge/rebase conflicts when each commit is small and easy to reason about. I agree, but I'd say it in the context of PRs. It's much easier to fix issues (and avoid them) when _PRs_ are small & easy to reason about.
      • gouggoug 5y ago
        It's entirely not insane _on the premise that the history is clean_. That's the whole argument that is being made here. If you think that "Preserving a PR's individual commits in the master branch is insane - many of those commits won't represent a fully working system anyway", your issue _is_ "that your commits don't represent a fully working system anyway", _that_ is what you need to fix. You need to make sure your history _does_ represent multiple small digestible atomic chunk of codes, that are understandable individually. By squashing, you're not fixing the root cause, you're treating the symptoms.
  • FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
    > Squash merge has the major disadvantage of getting rid of valuable meaningful git history. I think the main point of the article is that the Git history is often *not* valuable (because it's hard to enforce good commit messages). Your later points are very valid, however, and that's why I argue for smaller pull requests (and never merging a PR into main that leaves it in a broken state).
  • jtchang 5y ago
    > Squash merge has the major disadvantage of getting rid of valuable meaningful git history. There are reasons against it but the real world is messy. Developers tend to commit things, recommit, undo, redo, move things around. Is this valuable history? It can be but I would say 99% of the time it's more valuable to have a good commit message about what was intended rather than what actually happened. The idea of squash merge is to make the history clean from the get-go as you said.
    • Izkata 5y ago
      > Developers tend to commit things, recommit, undo, redo, move things around. I see 2-3 distinct final commits in that list there, ones that should be separate and not squashed into one: * commit, recommit, undo (squash these ones, and depending on how much "undo" does could eliminate this entirely) * redo (what exactly is in this one depends on how much "undo" did in the prior, and how the "redo" was done) * move things around (feature is seemingly already working and this is a distinct separate "improve the code" step) > Is this valuable history? Keeping that last one separate is absurdly valuable when trying to figure out why the code acts the way it does, when a bug is reported later. A lot of bugs I encounter were in those steps when someone makes a simple typo moving the code around, and having it in the history makes it obvious it wasn't an intended change.
  • asimpletune 5y ago
    Hey, so this POV comes up a lot, and I have to say that I think it mistakes how git commits should work, but I’ll add that you can sort of have both. First, in a production branch, git commits should be thought of as functions. Like “Apply commit X, get feature Y, unapply it and you get the reverse”. So the problem with preserving full git history in master is that it breaks that invariant. You have to sort of do like a range of commits, but then that doesn’t really always work because often times other commits can be interleaved into yours. To understand how I mean, just look at Linux or open source software projects, where the technical experts are more or less gatekeepers and aren’t accountable to any other influence. You’ll find that commits work this way, and their history is squashed. (Maintainers will also force you to rebase before merging and basically put all the work on you to get the PR in ship shape, which is a lot different from a corporate environment) Ok, but then to your point about preserving valuable, more granular commits, well, the solution is you just leave that remote branch up, either in your fork or elsewhere (but probably in your fork). These branches should have formal names identifying a ticket (at work) or an RFC or whatever, so it should be easy for people to discover what happened. They can see this remote issued a PR to this remote to implement RFC-123 or whatever, and they can go to that remote and see the granular commits if you preserved. Sorry, this is like a never ending debate and there are very strong opinions, but I sincerely think that in this situation there is actually a right answer. People who already know how to do this or are super familiar with open source, maintainers or team leads or whatever, I think don’t see the point in fighting over it, since they can just enforce whatever they want in their gatekeeper role. However, the truth is that there’s sort of a fundamental misunderstanding that the majority of the population has around git and I think it’s better to engage and explain when you get the chance.
    • gouggoug 5y ago
      > First, in a production branch, git commits should be thought of as functions. Like “Apply commit X, get feature Y, unapply it and you get the reverse”. So the problem with preserving full git history in master is that it breaks that invariant. You have to sort of do like a range of commits, but then that doesn’t really always work because often times other commits can be interleaved into yours. Merge commits allow you to do exactly that. If you have a branch with, say 15 commits, you can merge that branch _with a merge commit_, preserving all 15 commits, but if you need to revert, you revert the merge, which automatically reverts all 15 commits. > Ok, but then to your point about preserving valuable, more granular commits, well, the solution is you just leave that remote branch up So you went through all the trouble of making your git history something clean and valuable. And now, instead of merging it as-is with a merge commit into main, you squash the entire history (that you literally just spent time making useful) into main. Now, because you think you might need this history (that you spent time making pretty and valuable), you come up with a whole process of creating a remote branch, giving it a name that follows specific conventions and whatnot, you also make the decision that you'll keep these branches forever, and, you need a way to link that remote branch to the squashed history. What is the point of this whole process? When you could simply merge your feature branch (with its pretty and useful history you spent time working on) in main and be done with it? I have a feeling this whole process you came up with stems from the fact that you don't seem to be aware that you can revert a merge commit.
  • cortesoft 5y ago
    > When you squash merge a feature branch that has thousands of lines of code, and 6 months later you have a bug introduced by this feature branch, it becomes extremely hard to find which line introduced the bug. So, the only way that I can think that having the squash commit broken into individual commits would help to find the one broken line is because it would enable git bisect to find the failing commit. However, that implies that each individual commit inside that feature branch worked on its own. If that is the case, a better suggestion would be to break up the giant feature branch into smaller sub features that can be merged as they are completed
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • nemetroid 5y ago
      Even though most work can be split into a sequence of valid commits (i.e. sub-features), it's often not obvious how to best break up the larger feature before working on it.
      • cortesoft 5y ago
        Sure, but I don’t see how that changes the situation. There are three possibilities; you make a series of commits that are each complete and can run on their own, you make a series of commits that can’t be run on their own, or you make one big commit at the end with the full feature. If you are doing option 1, you could make one PR per commit, and each one could be squashed onto the main branch (although a single commit squash doesn’t do much). You can then use git bisect at a later time to find out which of those commits broke something. If you make a series of smaller, but non-functional commits, you won’t be able to use git bisect no matter if you squash them or not. If you squash them, git bisect will only tell you that the whole series of commits introduced a bug or not. If you don’t squash, git bisect won’t work because the build and/or tests will fail on the non-functional commits. You don’t gain better discoverability by not-squashing. The third option of one big commit makes squashing a moot point. Either way you only get one commit. My point is that you don’t get better discovery power by not squashing.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    Squash merge is for people who are so wedded to the idea that you should guess why the code is the way that it is instead of looking it up, that they want to make sure nobody else can do it either. You know, assholes. It’s fine if you don’t want to use something, or use it, as long as it doesn’t drag your whole team into your decision. Which squash merge does.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • drtz 5y ago
    > When you squash merge a feature branch that has thousands of lines of code, and 6 months later you have a bug introduced by this feature branch, it becomes extremely hard to find which line introduced the bug. The article makes an argument that each commit should be "a single logical change." Squashing thousands of lines of code from a long-running feature branches into a single commit is obviously not what the author is suggesting.
  • Cymen 5y ago
    I am in agreement however I suspect many developers have never seen the usage of "git bisect" to track down a bug and fix it. Once you see the power of that, I think one can come to appreciate more the granular git history that is present when not using squash commits. Of course, git bisect still works with squash commits it just makes your job as the bug fixer much harder because typically squashed commits are quite large so you have to figure out what in the N lines of code introduced the defect.
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      I would beg to differ. How large your commits are, depends on your tickets. As I've just explained in another reply, squash merging with rebases does not have any direct correlation with how large your commits are or whether you can use long lived feature branches. We do sometimes use feature branches for example (very sparingly) but then that feature branch becomes a temporary 'master' that we squash merge to and the feature branch does _not_ get squashed but the individual commits suddenly all appear on master after rebasing, which results in a nice fast-forward 'merge'. Those feature branches are the result of multiple tickets which all have their own individual commits and which could all have made directly against master using the squash merge strategy, except there were 'reasons' not to (which I usually try to dispel and work with master directly but it's not always possible).
  • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    I think you are using got commit log as a form of documentation. I half-agree. I don't agree devs should spend (much) time cleaning up their logs as opposed to actually writing docs (inline) that help the next person I do agree that there is rarely a good (even half good) history of decisions. This is never the Jira / tickets kept outside of the system. But it is also no good abusing the commit log as a form of ... journal. (I know that sounds silly but ) I think an actual journal / blog kept by the dev lead will be much more useful
    • oftenwrong 5y ago
      There's definitely value in putting documentation where it will be seen. For developers, writing in a code comment or commit message is a good bet. If there's an issue, they'll be in the code, and they'll be in the commit log, and they'll see what you've written. At times I've been asked to document things in a company wiki. Typically nobody reads it and it never gets updated when others make changes to the code.
  • bennysomething 5y ago
    Disagree, having a bunch of commits made up of undo, redo , dunno what I'm doing , oh no now I know, commits is pretty annoying. Squash solves that (for me, when dealing with other peoples merges). Obviously just my opinion etc
    • marton78 5y ago
      The problem is real and the parent commenter addresses it: learn interactive rebasing to craft a beautiful commit history.
  • streblo 5y ago
    > Developers should be required to submit _clean_ PRs, that is, PR's whose git history has been organized and refactored in such a way that it removed "clean up commits", "typo fix", etc. The only way I've ever seen this accomplished is through Github squash and merge.
  • Ozzie_osman 5y ago
    > When you squash merge a feature branch that has thousands of lines of code, and 6 months later you have a bug introduced by this feature branch, it becomes extremely hard to find which line introduced the bug. I try to avoid feature branches with "thousands of lines of code" on most of my teams, and have been pretty successful. Those types of feature branches create a lot of other problems. On the other hand, small, incremental pull requests that get merged back to master and have really short lifespans, along with things like feature flags to decouple delivering code from delivering functionality have worked really well. In this world, squash merges are awesome, because any squash merge is basically a "commit" in the other world, and developers can feel free to commit however they want within the branch.
  • garmaine 5y ago
    > On the other hand, if you kept the history, and if this history was clean from the get go, it becomes easy to read the commits one-by-one and understand the issue. Or git-bisect.
    • gouggoug 5y ago
      Yes, git bisect. But what does git bisect require to be useful? A set of small atomic commits that make it easy to identify which line of code might be the origin of a very subtle bug you're looking for. Squash+merge will not provide you with such history, and make bisecting much less useful.
  • codesnik 5y ago
    Mandatory squash merge would be very bad, right. But it sounds like success of this policy is highly dependent on the code size of average PR. I really liked to work at place where commits were usually squash-rebased, which got rid of most "typo"s, but long lived huge feature branches lived mostly usual life. And if possible, some logically atomic and finished groundwork parts of feature branches were extracted and squash-rebased into master ahead of time, slimming feature branch, sometimes to the point that feature branch could be squash-rebased too. Git blame was VERY pleasant to work with, and git-bisect would actually work if need would arise.
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      Using squash-merge doesn't mean that you can't use long-lived feature branches if that's something that you need for whatever reason. It just means that you basically have a multi-stage squash merge strategy. We do this from time to time. We only allow rebased squash-merge to master. When we do have a long-lived feature branch for something then this feature branch basically becomes the master for the individual ticket branches and at the end, the feature branch is rebased onto master and merged as a fast forward. It can result in 50 commits appearing on master all at once but each of those commits is an individual small commit just as if they had been done directly with master and the squash-merge strategy. We rebase this feature branch on master very regularly too (once per sprint actually) to keep up to date with master. We also try not to do any long lived feature branches in the first place.
  • eplanit 5y ago
    I see your points, but I disagree. FWIW, I also adopted the squash-merge only strategy with no regrets. > Squash merge has the major disadvantage of getting rid of valuable meaningful git history. It's not lost, at all -- it's in the branch it was squash-merged from. The point is that the topic/fix/experimental branch will likely have lots of history, including discarded ideas and other 'meanderings'. Every commit in that branch is meaningful in that it was a discrete step in that path. But, eventually what is _finally_ in that branch is what is relevant when merging to master. All that extra history in master would create confusion (and has for many in projects I've worked on). If the discipline is that every commit must be a meaningful, viable point _in master_, then a merge of the history would make sense -- but I've never seen that possible (or even desired) in practice.
  • MarkSweep 5y ago
    As long as CI is run on all commits, I’ll agree. If you don’t run CI on every commit, then you have to balance nicer commits a higher likelihood of bisecting not working as easily.
  • chris_wot 5y ago
    OpenOffice did what looks a bit like a "squash merge" way back in the day. It's a nightmare to work out where things got changed. I don't recommend it. I quite agree. Fix your commit history via an interactive rebase before you push. Learn to love fixup.
• hmsimha 5y ago
  This is great! The takeaway for me is that with squash merge you get one commit with all the changes which (optimally) has the full context in the commit message. My typical workflow is basically the same, but with putting all that context in the merge commit. This allows you to find it with a bit of work (blame to find the commit line, then figure out where that was merged in, then find the merge commit). Squash merge puts all that context in one commit, and keeps a linear history. I had assumed squash merge squashes the commits, then creates a merge commit still, which would mean you'd probably do something like combining messages for each commit in the squash commit message, then capturing the overview in merge commit. The article says you can still find the individual commits via PR, which is a minor disadvantage as it means you can only do exploration of these via github. If you've deleted the topic branch on github are they still accessible? If it's been garbage collected by git (or never existed locally if you're looking at someone else's changes), is there a way to check them out?
• decebalus1 5y ago
  The older I get the more I find these discussion as counterproductive as figuring out where to put the bike shed. I worked in teams that did squash merge and in teams that didn't. And in teams where some did and some didn't, on the same repo. In the grand scheme of things it didn't matter, except for hardliners who had nothing better to talk about.
  • jakeva 5y ago
    > figuring out where to put the bike shed. Anyway, the _real_ question is what color to paint the bike shed?
  • scubbo 5y ago
    I agree with your point, but, tangentially, I do find it amusing that "where to put the bike shed" is actually _more_ impactful than what I thought "bike-shedding" referred to (arguing about what _colour_ to paint the bike shed for a nuclear reactor). At least the location of the bike shed actually has some (small) effect on people's commute!
    • marcodave 5y ago
      that's some meta-bikeshedding over there (AKA bikeshedding the concept of bikeshedding), kudos to that!
  • allenu 5y ago
    Yep, I agree. In my ideal world, everybody (including me) would have pristine commits that are broken up logically. There wouldn't be small commits created as part of code review to fix things up based on feedback. You'd just have a single "Add feature X" or "Fix bug Y". However, it's an imperfect world and there are trade-offs. It's hard to train people to do things the right way, and then policing when they do it the wrong way or putting roadblocks in place to make them do it the right way takes energy, and often the benefit is minor. It really depends on how frequently you pore through your history to find an offending bug and a whole bunch of other team policy that isn't directly related to git commits. I used to spend a lot of energy rebasing so that I could have a beautiful history, but honestly it hasn't benefited me that much. I still rebase, but I'm not so strict about it on my commits, nor others. I'd rather spend my focus and energy elsewhere. Just do what the team is comfortable with and be flexible.
• waffletower 5y ago
  Many developers naively sell `git squash` using a clarity argument. By squashing you lose historical information: there are times when the content of a merge requires a paper trail, times when individual commits can aid to separate the portions of a merge you would like to keep versus those you would like to rollback. Perhaps in a 10 times a day release regimen you decide never to look for such history. One size does not fit all, however. I prefer a "have your cake and eat it too" approach. Keep the commit history. Use readily available tools to squash when performing analysis should you choose: `git log -p --first-parent` (git 2.31+ ability available in early versions of git with different syntax)
  • tharkun__ 5y ago
    I would argue that you only loose irrelevant information and you gain the ability to rollback. Without squashing, you are actually way worse off for a "10 times a day release regimen". We release every hour and we squash and rebase with a straight master history. This enables us to almost mechanically just roll back to the previous commit that was out on Prod, should something happen and it's very easy to skip (revert) just one ticket and let the rest go out. No guessing, no manual figuring out which 7 commits belong to the ticket in question, potentially 6 of them had the ticket number in the commit message like they should, but the 7th, which coincidentally is actually commit number 3 in the sequence but interleaved with other ticket's commits the developer switched some numbers and instead of ticket ABC-123 he wrote ABC-132. Now we have a production incident and a completely garbled attempt to undo it. We have none of those issues. Each ticket is one commit. If you revert one commit, you are guaranteed to have a working piece of software and you won't have a potentially not even compiling intermediate commit that was subsequently fixed up during a PR, which can happen without squashing.
    • gouggoug 5y ago
      >No guessing, no manual figuring out which 7 commits belong to the ticket in question, potentially 6 of them had the ticket number in the commit message like they should, but the 7th, [...] Lots of people it seems don't know this: _you can revert a merge commit_, which includes _all_ the commits that were part of the merge. So, if you have a feature branch with 7 commits, you merge those 7 commits _with a merge commit_, if you need to rollback, you rollback _the merge commit_, which includes all 7 commits.
• f154hfds 5y ago
  My org has started to strongly recommend squashing before merging (in my opinion one step less extreme than the forced squash-merge mentioned in the article). I tend to consider this a decent principle in general but rules are made to be broken. My main concern is if anyone ever commits based off of a pre-squashed branch. They won't be able to simply merge upstream after their parent has been squashed, they will now have to cherry-pick or incur strange redundant merge conflicts as they no longer share history. For a small team whose features tend to be short-lived before going upstream this won't likely be a problem but believe me, if you ever need long-lived feature branches on a larger team, squashing them can cause more trouble than your nice history will gain.
• nickbauman 5y ago
  Generally, time spent twiddling with the repo is time not spent delivering code. It's a distraction. Yes git has all these features that lets you do that and those feature matter when you're committing to the Linux repo which has thousands of eyes and your commit history has to help you communicate to a very wide audience. But the vast majority of us are not using git like this. I've used git bisect so rarely all this is overkill.
  • bonzini 5y ago
    Time spent twiddling with the repo is time saved in the future debugging or writing documentation. You can have large refactoring PRs for which splitting them further really makes little sense(*), but that have a huge risk of introducing regressions. Being able to bisect them is much easier with a properly maintained repository. (*) And then you spend time twiddling with GitHub, which is the same as twiddling with the repo except with worse tools.
  • gouggoug 5y ago
    - Generally time spent writing documentation is time not spent delivering code. - Generally time spent commenting code is time not spent delivering code. - Generally time spent diagramming on a white board is time not spent delivering code. - Generally time spent writing specs is time not spent delivering code. Yet, doing all of these are actually extremely important. How much importance you give each one of them is up to you that's for sure. So, "Generally, time spent twiddling with the repo is time not spent delivering code", is true, it's nonetheless important, and, this statement disregards the fact that "twiddling" usually only takes a few minutes.
    • nickbauman 5y ago
      I've never seen documentation efforts pay off in organizations that do not have documentation as a deliverable artifact to outside stakeholders. I've never used commit comments to store important information about the systems I'm working on. OTOH I can see people working on Linux needing that a lot more than I do. Feel free to twiddle if that floats your boat though. I will refrain from twiddling, thank you.
• deathanatos 5y ago
  Squash & merge is objectively worse than rebase && merge --no-ff.¹ (Roughly what the article calls "no fast-forward".) "No fast-forward" meets all of the criteria the article's author proposes: > 1. Combines all the code changes related to a single logical change Yes: the merge commit is that. > 2. Provides an explanatory commit message that helps people understand the intent of the change This is no more or less true that squash & merge. (Although, I don't off the top of my head remember how good the automatic message in Github is.) But that's more a problem of an automatic message than it is the merge strategy, & squash and merge also has this. (I've seen numerous squash commits with "Fix CI, Fix CI, Code formatting, Fix Lint warning" in them… Good commit messages boils down to the discipline of the coder. (And a reviewer being able to say, "Can you write a better commit message?".) > 3. If you pick this commit independently from the history, it makes sense on its own The merge commit. What you lose with squash & merge is the history. The author does sort of address this: > In case you are wondering if we are losing the individual changes, the answer is no. Each squash merge references back to a PR where the whole changes are tracked: And while this is technically true, it's a reference only in the textual message (which Github will nicely turn into a link, but you must be in Github for that). "No fast-forward" will maintain those references in the git commit parent information, which means that tooling like git bisect should be able to see into it. But with a squashed commit, the closest you get is "some commit in this PR", essentially. Same with reverts: if just one commit on a feature branch is bad, you can simply revert that one commit. (Or, if most of the branch is bad, you can revert the merge commit & cherry-pick the good bits.) If you don't want to see all the feature branch commits in the history, you can just follow first parents. ¹I prefer a quick rebase prior to merge but after code-review, as it is a good balance between the resulting history being readable, and not rewriting history while your reviewer is looking at it. But the argument here should hold regardless; the definition the article uses is sufficient, too.
• bob1029 5y ago
  I file this one under: It Depends™ If your software development process requires that multiple people have a hand in each pull request, or these pull requests are part of a more complex merge graph, then I can clearly see the argument for NOT doing squash merge. This is plainly obvious to me and I would be on your side for not going down the squash path. Knowing who was responsible for each part is a very important thing. If your software development process only ever has a single author per pull request, and these are only ever directed from work branch->master branch, then I would strongly argue for doing the squash merge option. This is what we do today, because we find it to be the ideal blend of hiding subjective commit styles while still preserving essential knowledge about who did what. Occasionally, we will break our own rules (oops i didn't squash that one), but we don't make a big deal out of it. There are way more important things to worry about most of the time. There is only ever 1 specific commit hash you build your software at, so it doesn't really matter if the branch has 1 or 10,000 commits in it.
• Qerub 5y ago
  It would be nice if GitHub allowed comments on commit messages and not only the changes so that they could be discussed for the benefit of learning and improvement. Squash merge commit messages are currently not reviewable at all since they are not entered until just before the merge. I'd prefer for nothing at all to be able to enter the main branch without review, if not for anything else to protect myself against my own mistakes. Guess I should give Gerrit a shot.
• tediousdemise 5y ago
  My old team’s git workflow required us to rebase our feature branches to develop before merging, and our branch could only contain a single commit. The commit needed a special formatting (short title, description, and story number) so it would get picked up by Jira scripts. Although the history was super clean, the extra upkeep was a small annoyance. I felt like tearing my hair out when there were 10 other merge requests pending and never knew which would be the next to merge with develop. An auto-rebase feature (assuming no merge conflicts) would have saved me countless pointless minutes.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  Squash was the thing that convinced me that the emperor has no clothes. Realizing that I was going to either have to train every junior, every four-month community-college student brought in on co-op to modify their history in an awful UI with tons of gotchas, or I would have to accept the downsides of squash? It's so stupid. Git desperately needs a layer above the commit that groups related commits together into a semantically commit-like object that you can show in history and jump to its HEAD and cherry-pick. Because the squash is a dumb hack, and meticulously editing your history is not productive work. I want squash. But I want squash without all the boneheaded implementation-detail downsides of squash. I want squash where I can put up a PR and keep working and then not have to deal with the cherry-pick pain if I want to build off that work after it merges. I want squash where I can leave the branch up after the merge and still see that it's behind the main branch. But git's simple "everything is a commit" model makes that impossible.
  • operator-name 5y ago
    Can't you achieve something similar with `--no-ff` and tags?
    • Pxtl 5y ago
      A tag defines an endpoint, not a group of related commits. Yes, I could roll my own adhoc layer on top of git but it wouldn't have any tooling support. "Well, you see you can infer the start of the rangE of commits for this feature by going back to the previoNOOOOOPE
      • operator-name 5y ago
        Leaving branches around would also work depending on the adhoc implimentation. I thought tags would be nicer as they'd be less than leaving thousands of branches. > Yes, I could roll my own adhoc layer on top of git but it wouldn't have any tooling support. Most git commands are ad hoc shell scripts built on git's internal data types. I can't see why adding your own would be that bad, a lot of external git tooling does this.
  • 5y ago
• chmaynard 5y ago
  Here's an alternative that appears to accomplish the same thing: # checkout feature branch git switch feature # reset HEAD while preserving changes to working tree # commits on feature branch will become orphans git reset --soft main # commit all changes on feature branch git add -A; git commit -m <feature description> # checkout the main branch and merge git switch main git merge feature
  • globular-toast 5y ago
    Yes. There are many ways to achieve the same thing with git.
• FalconSensei 5y ago
  I love squash-merge, and never had to see which specific commit inside a PR/MR changed a line. In my current project we use `JIRA-### Title` and the MR title (Gitlab). All information is in the ticket. Also, IF I needed to see the detailed commit history for that merge, Gitlab still has it. We try to have our ticket to be small, so any merge shouldn't have a long commit history anyway.
• wbronchart 5y ago
  I love clean linear history, but I don't like squash&merge, and I don't like the other options that the github interface gives you either. Plug: I wrote a script recently that merges github pull requests but preserves linear git history (basically, rebase + merge) https://pypi.org/project/git-pr-linear-merge/ https://pypi.org/project/git-pr-linear-merge/
  • epage 5y ago
    This is baked into Azure DevOps, I'm surprised they haven't pulled it over into GitHub.
    • wbronchart 5y ago
      Yeah, you'll find endless threads on github issues of people complaining Github doesn't have this yet. It's a real pain
• globular-toast 5y ago
  I don't really care what people do as long as they understand one thing: the entire point of keeping history is to be able to track regressions. Seriously, give me one other reason to not squash master down into a single commit every time I commit anything. If you understand the purpose of history then you'll understand it's important to keep it in order and then you can make a decision about how you keep it in order. Personally, I think squashing branches down leads to unnecessarily large commits. Smaller commits are better. > Commits are essentially immutable. Commits are immutable in the strictest possible sense. As is any other object in git. Not only that, you can't delete objects either. Every git repo in the universe together represents one giant, immutable, append-only object store.
  • u801e 5y ago
    > As is any other object in git. Not only that, you can't delete objects either. Every git repo in the universe together represents one giant, immutable, append-only object store. To be pedantic, it is possible to delete objects by manually or automatically running the git gc command. Objects that aren't referenced by other objects will eventually be deleted from the git object store.
• cratermoon 5y ago
  It seems DNSimple has determined that the git commit messages are the System of Record not only for what changed, but why. But there are other ways. You could name the branch (or put in the comment a number) for a ticket in the bug tracker/kanban/whatever you use to track work. You could add a link in the commit to internal discussion or documentation about the work. While a bit unorthodox, I'm not sure I can be against making the git repo history the canonical source for work history.
  • jakeva 5y ago
    In my experience squash messages combine the messages of the commits they consolidate. And the actual branch merged still exists, I don't buy hardlined stances against squashed merges.
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      > In my experience squash messages combine the messages of the commits they consolidate. I believe they do, by default, but the developer gets to modify. In other words, if I squash 3 commits, the git cli will set the resulting message to be a combination of all 3, but opens an editor to let me change it. I'm not for or against any git merge/squash/rebase flow on technical grounds, but I do want every message in the commit log to stand on its own. In other words, I agree 100% with the intent of what DNSimple does, and if this is how they chose to do it, I have no disagreement. What matters to me is outcome: the commit history as a useful 'document' for how we got to where we are now.
      • jakeva 5y ago
        I guess I haven't worked on a project important enough where the history is more important than the current state. Usually it's more like it might be useful to gain perspective by looking at the history, only to find it was a conflicted merge or the comment contained no useful info anyway ("Clean up", or "Fix this feature"). Even if it tried really hard to document the purpose of the change, I've rarely gotten more from a commit message than the content of the code changes in the commit.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  > You can use short-living branches to avoid repetitive merge of master > No, this doesn't work. It does if you have very few developers, each working on individual branches. But when multiple developers are working on multiple-feature branches together, that doesn't scale. We encourage backporting master often into your branch to limit the risk of conflicts, and stay on top of the latest changes. For example, we continuously update dependencies. We also merge and ship on average 10 times a day. Those are development branches that should be treated like master/main and developers should be writing short feature branches which are merged into those branches. And in the simplest case when you start work on N+1 then that becomes your main branch, and you fork off the stable N branch. Both of those are treated the same and devs should do PRs into them. Those PRs should ideally be simple things that are easy to review which should be single commits. This enables squash+rebase on those daily private branches. You can also fork off a nuclear reactor branch which is long-lived, occasionally merge back from the main branch and then merge into main later. I'd discourage that since you have the issues of merging and porting, potentially both ways. But again you shouldn't have devs directly committing to that branch and then pushing, they should be opening PRs of their work into it, when its merged, then other devs can pull that branch and rebase their local work on top of it. I've helped out individual devs with commits on top of their feature branches from time-to-time, but I consider that they've got the ultimate "write lock" on those branches. Typically as a result of actually chatting with them in zoom sometimes it might be faster to just push a commit with the work. But once that is done, its their private branch again, and I expect them to rebase and for me to have to deal with that if I look at it again. EDIT: Also the long-lived feature branches are going to be impossible to adequately review when it is time to merge them back into main. That code review needs to be happening all along the way if that is your process. You can't adequately review 4 months of work by several devs once at the end of it all. They need to be doing that the whole time. That calls for a branch they're doing their own PRs and code review into.
• s17n 5y ago
  I didn't realize that anybody didn't use squash, tbh.
• da39a3ee 5y ago
  Squashing PRs is mostly a good idea. However. When you fix a bug, you should nearly always: 1. Commit a failing test that reproduces the bug 2. Commit a fix And I tend to feel that this sort of informative history should be preserved in the main branch, seeing as we have technology that is designed to do that.
• u801e 5y ago
  With squash merge, Github will either: 1. Create a single commit and a merge commit that's empty because the single commit's parent is the current HEAD commit of the master branch 2. Create a single commit and a merge commit that has a diff because the single commit's parent isn't the HEAD commit of the master branch Scenario 1 essentially doubles the number of commits in the history, and the information in the merge commit message could easily be included in the squash commit message by amending it. Scenario 2 does the same thing, but could easily be changed to scenario 1 by rebasing on the HEAD commit of master before doing the squash merge. The fundamental problem with squash merging is that, depending on the scope of the PR change, you basically end up with a large commit that contains many changes that really ought to be separate individual commits. Those large commits are difficult to revert due to the sheer number of conflicts one will encounter when trying to revert them. On the other hand, well crafted individual commits can easily be reverted and are less likely to result in a conflict. Even if there are conflicts, they are limited in scope and can easily be dealt with since the commit itself doesn't really touch as many lines of code.
• beirut_bootleg 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until they try to use lerna, when they discover it tries to determine packages that have changed since the last tag but says all packages are brand new, because all of their tags are now dangling somewhere after the commit they were attached to got squashed.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  My biggest issue with squashing everything is that every non-trivial development necessarily composes of three types of changes: - functional changes (changes functionality as visible from outside), - refactorings (changes how application works internally) - reformatting (does not change the compiled paths but improves readability). Now, there is very good case for keeping these types of changes separate. For example, when I want to change something I may want to first refactor it (to bring the code to a state where the functional change can be done easier and is more clearly correct), then I will make separate commit/commits to modify the code functionally, then I will possibly follow with more changes to "clean up" -- refactor the code using my newly acquired knowledge. I always mark refactorings / reformat by starting the commit message with the word 'refactoring' or 'reformatting' so that any reviewer can easily see that these commit are not allowed any functional changes (and if I made one it means I made a mistake). What this means is that the functional changes are as light and to the point as possible, not burdened with unrelated changes. It makes it much easier to review and ensure they are correct when I "tell" the reviewer which parts of the change are intended to modify functionality and which are just housekeeping. That information obviously vanishes if you squash everything together. ** Another big problem with squashing commits is that they become very large. I find it makes much more sense to compose a large change from smaller, simple, logical, understandable changes that each produces (hopefully) working application. If you find a problem with the commit (for example as a result of bisecting to find where something was introduced) it is much easier to understand what the change intended and compare this with the actual code modification to figure out where I failed. Obviously, when you squash it the information is gone.
• bassdropvroom 5y ago
  I've never understood the need for squash merging. One of the biggest advantage this article mentions is that the history will look neater. Well what if I told you that you can have both? Git log has the `--merges` flag (I could be mistaken on the flag name), which will remove everything that's not a merge (it does require using `--no-ff` which github et al use when merging PRs). Now you have a clean commit history that doesn't include the individual commits as if it was squashed. But your real history still contains the individual commits thus doing something like bisect will give you much small commits to look at. Granted, I'm not aware of github or the like having a view that only shows merges but git log command definitely does.
• nojvek 5y ago
  I love squash merge. I’ve seen it being enforced in many places I’ve worked at. You’d think losing commit history due to squash is a bad thing, but it’s actually a good thing in a large team. When you have 100s of merged into master you want to see one atomic commit per PR. If something is wrong, then you can revert that individual commit. It’s also much better signal:noise ratio. Most individual commits in PRs are like “fix”, “ugh! lint” and things like that. The PR title has much better names. GitHub squash merge adds title and link to pull request with the number. So if you want to see finer version of squash commit, you can always do that. However squash merges tell you one big then in the main/master branch “who did what when”. Git bisects to find when a regression was introduced work work well. The whole idea is a merged PR is a piece of work ready to be deployable. Individual PR commits are not.
• welearnednothng 5y ago
  This is one of the things I miss about Perforce - every merge was effectively a squash merge, but the branch was still there, just not visible by default (if I remember correctly). It was the best of both worlds - you keep a complete audit trail, but it was out of the way and didn’t interfere with your day to day view of the commit log. Moreover, there was never any discussion on merge strategies as there was just the one way to do it. On top of that, they had some amazing tools for aiding in audits when you needed them. I’m not suggesting we all switch to Perforce! But I do miss that aspect of it.