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by BurningFrog 1768 days ago
With normal review cycle times, this would slow things very much.

Optimizing your development practices for being able to revert single commits seems very wrong to me. If you produce so many bugs that this is important, I'd focus on making fewer bugs.

At my current job I can't remember us reverting a commit in the three years I've been here.

We probably work in very different environments, and your views may be the pragmatic ones in your environment.
4 comments
mytailorisrich 1768 days ago
> With normal review cycle times, this would slow things very much.

I don't think it does. Ultimately you need to review everything so if you ensure that each commit is logically coherent it actually makes reviews easier.

Otherwise, in my experience, things can get quite messy and the history very difficult to follow.

It's also impossible to predict when or if you'll need to revert a commit. If you follow good practices and have discipline then you make your life much easier if things go wrong or you need to cherry-pick something, which is quite common with bug fixes if you have several branches (e.g. one branch per release).

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BurningFrog 1768 days ago
For whatever reason, the events you say are quite common, pretty much never happens on my teams.

So we don't need to optimize for handling them.

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jrootabega 1768 days ago
I agree that reverting a single commit is less common than we might plan for, but don't smaller commits help review? That's how it is on my team. You can review smaller change batches instead of a whole pr or branch diff
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cratermoon 1768 days ago
> With normal review cycle times, this would slow things very much.

Compared to how much it would slow things down having to try to revert or correct a commit that both fixes a bug and introduces a feature? Especially if that change involved any sort of DB schema change that had to be reverted.

Anyone who has ever gone to production with a set of changes that involved an important bug fix and introduced a high-value feature, only to find that the whole thing had to be reverted because of a bug in the new feature, re-introducing the bug to customers, knows the importance of small, separable changes.

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nemetroid 1767 days ago
The unit of review doesn't have to be a single commit.
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