Patch-perfect commits are an idealistic goal. The truth is that, as already mentioned, many of those typos and “dirty” commits can be the source of bugs that you’re looking for. Hiding them hides the history.
Indeed they are, hence the need to rewrite the history. Managers, tech leads, or users of your OSS project don't care about the "fix typo" comments. They are interested in a meaningful history that tells a bigger story.
And to be frank, I am interested in the same, mid-term and long-term. While I am grappling with a very interesting problem for a month then yes, I'd love my messy history! But after I nail the problem and introduce the feature I'll absolutely rewrite history so the squashed PR commit simply says "add feature X" or "fix bug Y".
> Managers, tech leads, or users of your OSS project don't care about the "fix typo" comments. They are interested in a meaningful history that tells a bigger story.
Why would they be looking at the version control system for this? That is not what it's there for.
GitHub in particular is widely used by managers -- not the higher-level managers of course, but a lot of engineering managers have mastered the usage of GitHub issues, Markdown task lists inside PR descriptions, and reviewing results of CI/CD pipelines.
And many tech leads simply don't have the time to review every single WIP commit. They want meaningful message/description of the big squashed PR commit. If you just post a merged list of all commit messages with 10x "fix stuff" inside you'll be in big trouble the next time around and your work will be inspected very closely.
The practices I am describing to you are reality in many tech companies. Writing code there is not about you at all. And almost nobody will read your code and PR descriptions unless they really have to. Hence it's a professional courtesy to make those as small and meaningful as possible.
Why? You don't need to. GitHub will show you that diff, git itself will show you that diff. There is no need to permanently rewrite history to do this. That makes no sense.
That is absolutely what it's there for! git blame and git log are extremely commonly used, git bisect is only convenient in a commit history where breakage is uncommon, &c
Problem is, when you're debugging later on you need to understand what a breaking commit does (or is intended to do) before knowing what it did wrong.
Let alone the code review issue. In any multi-person project, it is just as important that your commit history be readable by a third party for information as that it be useful for your own personal debugging.
That's not realistic at all. Programmers are often times "in the zone" and having to craft perfect messages while you're rushing on to the next problem is killing productivity.
Compromises with human nature must be made. Hence -- we need to be able to rewrite history.
Your academic purism is out of place, dude. Real humans don't work like you say they do. Some do -- most don't.
I'm of the opinion that you should commit WIP stuff. Use the SCM for managing your source code, damn it!
Just don't publish WIP crap; fortunately, you can have your cake and eat it too, with git.
The biggest reason git (and any similarly advanced SCM) is superior to non-distributed alternatives like Subversion is that I can use it to manage my own workflow, instead of just as the final off-site backup of whatever I decide to publish. I get to actually use everything git offers for shuffling commits and code around while coding.
Want to switch contexts quickly? git commit the whole thing and just switch a branch.
How about untangling a hairy merge? Do it piecemeal and commit when you're done with each bit; it's trivial to then undo mistakes, redo, combine or reorder stuff and you cannot lose any work by accident because git commits are immutable.
All of these features essentially require history rewriting; sure, you're free to rebrand and not call "store WIP state in repository" a commit even though it is one, but I would consider any SCM without these features nigh useless for most work.
Indeed they are, hence the need to rewrite the history. Managers, tech leads, or users of your OSS project don't care about the "fix typo" comments. They are interested in a meaningful history that tells a bigger story.
And to be frank, I am interested in the same, mid-term and long-term. While I am grappling with a very interesting problem for a month then yes, I'd love my messy history! But after I nail the problem and introduce the feature I'll absolutely rewrite history so the squashed PR commit simply says "add feature X" or "fix bug Y".