this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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Well squash and merge isn’t default or pushed in any way. It’s an option, and we chose to enable it ourselves because that’s what works best for us. It’s what works well for many other projects too, which is why many choose to enable it instead of the default merge commit.
Yeah, but phabricator and Gerrit are entirely separate workflows from GitHub, and a lot of people prefer that workflow because it leads to encouraging better histories and reviews. It helps you in getting rid of the "fixed typos" type of commits, while still letting you make larger PRs.
GitHub obviously does let you keep a clean git history, but the code review workflow in GH just doesn't encourage reviewing commits.
I think the idea here is that reviewing individual commits is irrelevant if the plan is just to squash it all down. Each PR corresponds to a single change on the main branch in the end, the fact there was a main commit followed by a half size “fixed typos” and “fixed bug” commits doesn’t actually matter since it will be blown away in the end. The process results in the same clean history with good individual commits on the main branch, just as if the user squashes those commits locally before pushing it up to the code review platform.
Right, but squashed commits don't scale for large PRs. You could argue that large PRs should be avoided, but sometimes they make sense. And in the case where you do have a large PR, a commit by commit review makes a lot of sense to keep your history clean.
Large features that are relatively isolated from the rest of the codebase make perfect sense to do in a different branch before merging it in - you don't merge in half broken code. Squashing a large feature into one commit gets rid of any useful history that branch may have had.
I agree, and GitHub allows choosing how to merge each PR individually if you need to do something different for a specific PR. Large PRs like that are at most 1% of our total PRs, and we review those more per-commit and use a merge commit instead of a squash. By default we optimize for the other 99%.