My Favourite Git Commit

Re:My Favourite Git Commit by CharlesColeman on Friday October 18, 2019 @11:48AM (#21292379)

I really like this commit message. I've found that switching to git from more traditional version control systems requires a lot more discipline in some ways. A lot of people just commit, commit, commit lots of incremental changes with no context or story to them. I've seen pull requests with dozens of tiny commits together make up a cohesive effort, but individually are just useless. I've been really having to push my team to spend time to cleaning up their commit history before getting their pull requests merged.

I think it's really important to capture the context and indent behind changes. I may be weird, but when I'm fixing an issue, often try to find when it was introduced, which often provides really useful information for the fix. That's much harder to do if the commits aren't cohesive and the messages aren't descriptive.

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Re:My Favourite Git Commit by seanbarry on Friday October 18, 2019 @11:53AM (#21292423)

Implement and enforce conventional commits: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

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Re:My Favourite Git Commit by generaljelly on Friday October 18, 2019 @11:55AM (#21292439)

I'm one of those people. I make lots of little commits, it gives me space to really make a mess of coding going down some rabbit hole and performing 'reset --hard' when I get too away from myself, and track what I'm doing locally. As long as each commit isn't causing a problem with CI/CD, and my pull request to master is well documented what is the value added of cleaning up commits?

(Junior developer here, looking to be convinced!)

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Re:My Favourite Git Commit by adwww on Friday October 18, 2019 @02:13PM (#21293716)

Depends how you handle your PRs. If you squash and rebase within Github or similar, no problem.

But ideally interactive rebase before you push your PR and tidy up all those commits into larger topical ones.

Eg.

"DEV-1 - Write tests for widget X calculator" "DEV-1 - Implement widget X calculator" "DEV-1 - Refactor widget X factory service"

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Re:My Favourite Git Commit by CharlesColeman on Friday October 18, 2019 @03:27PM (#21294359)

> I make lots of little commits, it gives me space to really make a mess of coding going down some rabbit hole and performing 'reset --hard' when I get too away from myself, and track what I'm doing locally.

I think this is totally OK, just as long as you squash those all down before someone has to merge your PR.

> As long as each commit isn't causing a problem with CI/CD, and my pull request to master is well documented what is the value added of cleaning up commits?

Because it's hard to make sense of all those little commits later, so why keep them around? They're just noise with a very limited future value, and I don't want to have to sift through them in the future. It's basically impossible to clean up those kinds of messes once they get established in master, but it's very easy to contain them at pull request time.

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