[CrunchyTaco]

My gripe with merge commits is they don't integrate nicely with `git blame`. If I'm looking through historic commits (to understand why a change was made, or perhaps to debug an issue) I'll often `git blame` the line and diff that commit. If the commit is super granular, I can't get the context of the whole change: I need to dig for the merge commit then look at that, which is faff.

If there's a way that I don't know to show merge commits in blame rather than the actual source change commit, then I'd be all over it. Until then, single (whole) units of change per commit.

[WorldMaker]

`git blame --first-parent` will stick to merge commits in blame output.

[Aeolun]

Why would you want one author for a merge commit? That merge can have many commits by many different authors.

[SkyPuncher]

They can, but

1. The large majority of PRs I've reviewed have a single contributor. Additional contributors are rare. When they do happen, they're often a minority contributor or simply consulting on a PR. It's net neutral when all PRs are squashed in the same pattern.

2. Even with multiple contributors, most features have one leader. It's much easier to talk to that person (and have them delegate) than it is to piece together multiple contributions.

[wcarss]

That's an interesting point, but it seems like one among many very good arguments for "right-sized" or "logical" commits, i.e. not 10 similar-shaped bugfixes and also not one-line no-context diffs -- how big should the PR and merge commit be though? Maybe you put the 10 similar-shaped bugfixes together into one PR because they review together easily, but each fix is its own commit, because they all logically stand on their own.

Your use-case is actually the cause of a common rule I've seen at work of requiring a ticket reference in each commit message, which allows looking up the original ticket and associated PRs, along with any commentary & discussion at the time the commit was merged.

On a big code-archeological dig, I often follow a path like run blame -> look at the diff -> pull the ticket reference -> find ticket in issue tracker -> read its description & comments -> find linked PR #'s in the ticket tracker -> open PRs & read diffs and comments -> repeat for linked issues if needed (and then as often as not still end up baffled)

One team actually kept an old redmine VM instance running mostly based on my personal use long after we'd migrated to JIRA, so... I think my approach may be a little unusual! At the least, doing better sized commits would a huge step for every case involving blame.