Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Dylan16807 3588 days ago
>Future devs are just as capable at traversing repos and collapsing diffs as you or I, so there's no need to lie to them.

The ability of devs to collapse a bunch of commits into a useful summary is near zero right now. You can only achieve it by rewriting history. Unless you think that feature is going to be commonplace very very soon, there is a compelling reason to lie.
1 comments
chriswarbo 3588 days ago
> The ability of devs to collapse a bunch of commits into a useful summary is near zero right now

You can get quite far with 'git diff START END'. Something more task-specific can probably be done with Emacs, Magit, Ediff mode, bash, elisp, etc.

Even if you think collapsing commits by rewriting history is useful for making summaries, etc. what makes you think you can produce a more useful summary right now than that future dev can, considering the fact that you don't know what they might want?

The nice thing about git is that anyone can make a new branch from any point in the repo's history, merge, cherry pick, rebase, etc. to their heart's content, then garbage collect it once they've learned what they needed.

link
Dylan16807 3588 days ago
What makes me think I can write better code than the thousand people downloading my repo later? I don't, but somebody should do the summarizing, and it might as well be me.

Smashing the diffs together gets you the least useful parts of a purposeful squash commit.

link
chriswarbo 3588 days ago
> somebody should do the summarizing, and it might as well be me.

Should they? See my earlier point about gilding lilies and YAGNI ;)

Of course, there are always exceptions! The most obvious ones are processes which work per-commit, e.g. bisecting, conflict resolution, per-commit code review, etc. where having a bunch of interleaved "stories" can be tedious.

link