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Comment by bsimpson

8 days ago

I use GitHub because that's where PRs go, but I've never liked their PR model. I much prefer the Phabricator/Gerrit ability to consider each commit independently (that is, have a personal branch 5 commits ahead of HEAD, and be able to send PRs for each without having them squashed).

I wonder if federation will also bring more diversity into the actual process. Maybe there will be hosts that let you use that Phabricator model.

I also wonder how this all gets paid for. Does it take pockets as deep as Microsoft's to keep npm/GitHub afloat? Will there be a free, open-source commons on other forges?

Personally, I'd like to go the other way: not just that PRs are the unit of contribution, but that rebased PRs are a first-class concept and versioning of the changes between entire PRs is a critical thing to track.

  • This is coming to GH soonish. Some clunky alpha version of this UI has been shared on the bad social site. (First class rebasing / stacked PRs)

> and be able to send PRs for each without having them squashed

Can't you branch off from their head and cherry-pick your commits?

  • That's effectively what I do. I have my dev branch, and then I make separate branches for each PR with just the commit in it. Works well enough so long as the commits are independent, but it's still a pain in the ass to manage.

    • That’s the trick in your system — all commits have to be completely independent. Generally mine aren’t, so unless we want to review each minor commit, they get squashed.

      I can see merit in your suggestion, but it does require some discipline in practice. I’m not sure I could do it.

    • Perhaps I'm missing something... If your commits are not all independent - I don't see how could they ever be pulled/merged independently?

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