[kelnos]

> The unsafe versions of these things literally throw out history and replace it with a fiction that whoever did the final operation wrote everything, or that the original author wrote something possibly very divergent from what they actually wrote.

When I'm rebasing my own work and editing history, that's exactly what I'm looking to accomplish, though.

[rmunn]

The team I work for tends to use GitHub's "Squash and merge" button a lot. I find it to be the best of both worlds: the `develop` branch gets a single commit per PR, with a summary of what was done (I always edit the summary commit message and reduce it from a copy of 20 commit messages down to just the most important 4-5, deleting the entirety of messages like "fixup" or "address review comments"). But the PR on GitHub also preserves the history of the commits, so anyone who wants to look at the messy commit history can follow the PR link and see the actual commits.

I'm sure there are other Git forges that would support a similar workflow, with a "Squash and Merge" button or equivalent, but my team hasn't felt any need to migrate away from GitHub so I've never yet investigated that in detail.

Only downside I've found to this workflow is that it would make it harder to migrate to a different Git forge in the future: unless you're very careful with the migration, the PR numbers are likely to be different (perhaps resetting at 1, even) and the other forge won't end up with the commits that are on GitHub's copy of the repo but no longer on any active branch (we also use the "auto-delete branches when you hit the merge button" option). But it would still be possible for a migration tool to handle this correctly: look at all PRs on GitHub, grab the commits from them, and migrate them to Merge Requests on the new forge.

[anonymars]

It boggles my mind that instead of this being a UI projection, git instead ingrains a process where developers habitually destroy their history (and bisection options, and merge conflict resolution), therein loading an additional footgun that goes off every now and again when it turns out a now-squashed branch was the basis of (or merged into) some other branch

[masklinn]

It’s important to note that not all history is worth keeping, and keeping a dozen commits titled “fix” fixing build / CI errors from the original changes are a lot worse for bisecting than squashing it all into just one.

I very much prefer keeping histories by default (both my personal workflows and the tools I build default to that) but squash is a valuable tool.

[lmm]

> keeping a dozen commits titled “fix” fixing build / CI errors from the original changes are a lot worse for bisecting than squashing it all into just one.

How so? When I bisect I want to get down to a small diff, landing on a stretch of several commits (because some didn't build) is still better than landing on a big squashed commit that includes all those changes and more. The absolute worst case when you keep the original history is the same as the default case when you squash.

[masklinn]

Because they’re broken and their only purpose is to fix up the original change, so it’s functionally the same change.

> The absolute worst case when you keep the original history is the same as the default case when you squash.

No, now you have a bunch of worthless broken commits that you need to evaluate and skip because they’re not the problem you’re looking for.

[lmm]

> Because they’re broken and their only purpose is to fix up the original change, so it’s functionally the same change.

Do you restrict yourself to 1 non-broken commit per PR? I don't, and nor does anyone I've worked with. If there were even 2 non-broken commits in the PR, then bisecting with the original history lands you on a diff half the size that bisecting with squashed history would, which is a significant win. (If you didn't care about that sort of thing you wouldn't be bisecting at all).

> No, now you have a bunch of worthless broken commits that you need to evaluate and skip because they’re not the problem you’re looking for.

What are you "evaluating"? If you want to ignore the individual commits and just look at the overall diff that's easy. If you want to ignore the individual messages and just look at the PR-time message that's easy too. Better to have the extra details and not need them than need them and not have them.

[rmunn]

Yes, a good Git log viewer that would auto-squash branches down to a summary, and allow "expanding" them, would be useful. But the way branching and merging creates confusing train-track graphs is IMHO one of the reasons why many teams end up using the squash-and-merge workflow. There's definitely room for improvement there...

[anonymars]

For sure. It just bugs me that we're stuck between two bad options.

Now let's also talk about renames...

[globular-toast]

I would assume most people who would enable an "auto squash" option also aren't carefully creating and curating commits. Bisect is useless if half your commits are broken. People regularly make commits that don't even build, much less pass QA and deliver a valid version of the software. These are works in progress, broken versions and should be deleted.

If you actually do like to deliver the correct number of commits then it's frustrating to work with people who don't care. In that case I would suggest making the squash optional but you could also try selling your team on doing smaller commits. In my experience you either "get it" or you don't, though. I've never successfully got someone to understand small commits.

[Izkata]

> I would assume most people who would enable an "auto squash" option also aren't carefully creating and curating commits.

Or don't have a choice. Our department-wide rules were almost to require that for all repos, I had to push hard just to make it "strongly suggested" instead.

[kadoban]

Git doesn't do that. People needlessly destroying history do that.

Git will happily let you merge branches and preserve the history there. GP seems to like that history being in PRs only on github instead. I don't get why, that just seems worse to me.

[plasticchris]

The why is that most people when given the merge option don’t clean up their history so you end up with tons of garbage fix up commits.

[DiggyJohnson]

That is an issue of ignorance, not laziness. It’s not obvious at all to an average developer that only uses `add/commit/merge/fetch/push/pull/rebase/restore/reset` that they can manipulate their change history.

[plasticchris]

The cause stops mattering after a while, either you have to go on a full time campaign to educate people… or switch the setting to rebase and squash and be done with it.

[rmunn]

Off-topic, but what does GP stand for? I know OP usually means Original Poster, but I'm not familiar with GP.

[kadoban]

Grand-parent, as-in the parent of my parent comment.