Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by falcojr 566 days ago
How is a "PR comments" commit useful to you? If I'm looking at history, it's usually to see: 1. What caused a bug 2. Context around a feature and why it was written a certain way

Seeing a "PR comments" commit just turns into noise. It also makes me gather 10 commits together to try to piece back together the unit of work that was built. I just see no value in preserving this type of noise.

1 comments

That is a perfect example. The "PR comments" commit helps me see what the dev considered most important (code before this commit), and what the rest of the team considered lacking (the content of this commit). Thus, the Git history records a facet of the team culture at the time of the commit.
No, you're making up that story and that culture, and when you lose this spurious foundation, you'll just as easily make up some other story based on any other random data.

For example, reality could've been that there was no team involved at all and all those changes came to the original person the moment he made the PR. And the "PR comments" could just as easily refer to his own comments he added during when checking those CI messages and noticing something else and commenting on that not to forget.

In my experience the merge commit is simply a reference to the PR, which has all the context. The title of the PR is effectively the commit summary.