this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
282 points (98.6% liked)
Linux
48090 readers
754 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Also, GitHub PRs atleast to me feel like they encourage reviewing changes by the total diff of the entire PR, and not each commit. I don't want a slog of commits that don't add any value - it just makes doing things like reverts more annoying. Stuff like Gerrit and phabricator enforce reviews by making you review individual commits / changes / whatever you want to call them and not branch diffs.
GitHub has an option when merging a PR to “squash and merge”. This option squashes all of the commits on the PR branch into a single commit and cherry-picks it on top of the base branch. We use this by default in our open source projects at work. Most people are not gonna go through the effort of making a well defined patch series the way it would be required for a Linux kernel contribution. Most changes aren’t that big though and so it doesn’t really matter. Send as many commits as you want in the PR, I’ll just review the diff as a whole and squash it when I’m done. Workflows should adapt to user preference, not the other way, and this is a good example of that.
How much of that is what GitHub encourages and how much of that is what Users prefer? Plenty of users seem to enjoy phabricator / Gerrit for code review in practice precisely because of their workflows.
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%.