Item — HN Reader

You're describing the wrong use of squash merges, and I agree they suck.

The right use is to allow me to make crappy, random commits on my own feature branch, clean them up those commits when I'm ready to release the change.

And the commit description will describe what's going on.

The key is that my feature branch is not long-lived - only a day or two, long enough for me to make a step forward before merging it back into mainline and then starting on the next step.

2 comments

If you do this for short-lived feature branches only, why do you even need to squash merge for this? What I typically do for such things is to have a WIP commit that I amend and force push while working on the feature, then when everything is ready to merge I reset —-soft and make separate commits for each part of the work that can be compiled and tested indivually, rebase onto master and then fast-forward merge.

I think you just answered your own question. Compared to your workflow, the squash-merge workflow allows:

- Commit and push naturally as you work

- Reviewers to look at individual commits separately after having already reviewed previous commits

- Squash-and-merge with one click (usually, e.g. GitHub) instead of messing around with git resets and branch history.

Even for a short lived feature branch that lasts maybe a day or so there may be a bug you find during testing that you quickly fix, or a change you make in existing code to help support the new feature or something you know is coming down the pipeline, and that information is now lost.

Or you could make consideration for tracking that change in source code a priority when making those changes and code appropriately.

The problem you describe is a problem because people are not prioritizing or valuing the commit history as a resource. If you fix that, then people will think about these things differently.

Squash and merge is not the only way to get things into master. You can rebase and squash commits as needed on your branch and then bring multiple commits from your branch onto master. That takes more advanced usage of git, but learning that makes sense once you start really valuing the history.

You can say that about any commit in the repo, no matter how granular the commits are.