[nhaehnle]

> Every PR/commit merged to master should be a clean logical unit.

The issue is one of review scaling. I wrote a blog post about this a while ago[0], but the gist of it is that those clean logical units are often too small for meaningful high-level reviews of more complex work.

With complex features or refactorings, you're often in a situation where those clean logical units allow reviewers to do a good low-level review (do a check for logic corner cases, style issues, etc.) but they don´t allow a high-level review of how all the pieces of the feature work together.

IMHO the most open-source process friendly solution to the issue is to review patch series, where you can review the series as a whole for the big picture, but also dig into individual commits for the details. Building such a patch series requires an approach as described in the article.

(In closed source environments, you may get a good enough approximation of the result with a separate, disciplined software design process.)

[0] http://nhaehnle.blogspot.com/2020/06/they-want-to-be-small-t...