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by AnthOlei 617 days ago
I’ve recently spent time truly learning git, and I’m realizing how much better it is to take care of your commits in a PR even if you squash to main.

My reviewers love when I write “review commit by commit” in the PR description. Then each individual commit has its own reasoning, and you can mentally switch into reviewing if that commit does it’s one thing it’s supposed to do correctly. I will accept the argument that each commit should be its own PR though :)
2 comments
keybored 617 days ago
This is so puzzling to me. It’s like people[1] get so stuck in the GitHub PR framework/mindset that they then, after realizing that GitHub PRs suck for reviewing individual commits, discard commits as the reviewable unit and then shoehorn one-commit-per-PR as a replacement.

The PR is just the best GitHub had to offer. There are other approaches to code review.

[1] Here we are generalizing.

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skydhash 617 days ago
I treat PRs like the email workflow. You send a diff my way for a particular changes, I either accept it or reject it. Or I suggest modifications. Recursively. It’s the whole patch I’m interested in, not the implementation history (I’m not your tutor). Once approved, I make a commit in main for this diff.
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keybored 617 days ago
The classic email workflow is either one patch or a patch series. Where each patch becomes a commit. And each patch can be reviewed in isolation (like a commit).

It is not anemic like the squash workflow.

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skydhash 617 days ago
There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a PR series. My reasoning for the squash workflow is described here[0]. I just equate a PR to a patch. And it becomes a commit in the main branch. I don’t really care about the commits in the PR, just like no one cares about the commits that produced the patch in the email workflow.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41839282

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keybored 617 days ago
> I don’t really care about the commits in the PR, just like no one cares about the commits that produced the patch in the email workflow.

They do care. They go through the trouble of reviewing it so that the resulting commit[1] that lands in the upstream repository is good.

[1] Presumably you don’t mean “they don’t care about the commit that produced the patch”… since the patch is just a transport format for the commit.

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skydhash 617 days ago
> Presumably you don’t mean “they don’t care about the commit that produced the patch”… since the patch is just a transport format for the commit.

Commits. Not everyone will care to clean up their local history just to produce a single patch. You can git diff it out.

EDIT:

I was using "patch" for diff so scratch the above comment. Even then, when using a forge, I'd rather use squash unless everyone clean up their commit history when producing a PR.

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ngrilly 617 days ago
Exactly! Stacked diffs/changes are the way, with one commit per PR. https://www.stacking.dev/
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