Sure, but how much of that is justification and backpedaling?
If it’s worth a commit, it’s worth a description. “Address vulns” “fix config” “remove files”. It doesn’t take much. Even if it’s just “more address vulns”.
Often I commit because I have to jump to another branch, so I want to save my progress. This means I can be in the middle of something, so I write a trash message.
All those messages will disappear anyway after the merge request, because we use a squash policy. I can spend more time thinking of a more proper commit message when writing the merge request.
Also, squashing is a pretty bad practice as it is. I can understand that it may make sense sometimes, but most of the time if you don’t commit every other character you input, you’re better off leaving some history of how your code evolved and what changes were coming together
I think squashing is great and I would never want to go back. It helps ensuring:
All commits in main have useful messages. No more “fix pipeline errors”, “fix MR comments”, etc.
Ensures pipeline has been successful with all commits in main. No need to guess which commits will build and won’t build.
Easy to revert commits.
Eliminates incompressible history because someone had a bad day with git.
Encourages frequent commits. No need to ensure all commits are perfect and good in their own right. Commit when you want to commit even if it’s incomplete work.
And IMO, if your work warrants multiple commits, then it probably also warrants multiple merge requests. Merge requests should be rather small to make it easier to review.
Edit: another good thing is that when we decide to release, we can easily look through the commit history for a change log. No more sifting through minor fixes commits.
It’s more about the tooling. IDEs make it really simple.
Also people get scared when they hear it because of utterances like yours. I’m dumb af. Git rebase for your use cases can be renamed to “git edit-history $fromCommit”. Nothing special about it.
But shouldn’t be. How hard is it to summarize your work in a few words? Even a bad description is more memorable than a hash.
The post mentions that these are for commits in a merge request before squash. When they’re squashed a proper message is given.
Sure, but how much of that is justification and backpedaling?
If it’s worth a commit, it’s worth a description. “Address vulns” “fix config” “remove files”. It doesn’t take much. Even if it’s just “more address vulns”.
Often I commit because I have to jump to another branch, so I want to save my progress. This means I can be in the middle of something, so I write a trash message.
All those messages will disappear anyway after the merge request, because we use a squash policy. I can spend more time thinking of a more proper commit message when writing the merge request.
How about
WIP: <description of what you wanted but did not achieve yet>
?git worktree
could become your new friend then :)Also, squashing is a pretty bad practice as it is. I can understand that it may make sense sometimes, but most of the time if you don’t commit every other character you input, you’re better off leaving some history of how your code evolved and what changes were coming together
I think squashing is great and I would never want to go back. It helps ensuring:
And IMO, if your work warrants multiple commits, then it probably also warrants multiple merge requests. Merge requests should be rather small to make it easier to review.
Edit: another good thing is that when we decide to release, we can easily look through the commit history for a change log. No more sifting through minor fixes commits.
git rebase
trumps all of the things you mentioned…Anti Commercial-AI license
Git rebase can be hard to understand for many. Not everyone has the blessing of being in a team of Git gurus.
It’s more about the tooling. IDEs make it really simple.
Also people get scared when they hear it because of utterances like yours. I’m dumb af. Git rebase for your use cases can be renamed to “git edit-history $fromCommit”. Nothing special about it.
Anti Commercial-AI license