Comment by mikepurvis
11 hours ago
In codebases where PRs are squashed on merge, the commit messages on the main branch end up being the PR body description text, and that's actually reviewed so tends to be much better I find.
11 hours ago
In codebases where PRs are squashed on merge, the commit messages on the main branch end up being the PR body description text, and that's actually reviewed so tends to be much better I find.
And in every codebase I've been in charge of, each PR has one or more issue # linked which describe every possible antagonizing detail behind that work.
I understand this isn't inline with traditional git scm, but it's a very powerful workflow if you are OK with some hybridization.
I personally find this to be a substantially better pattern. That squashed commit also becomes the entire changeset - so from a code archeology perspective it becomes much easier to understand what and why. Especially if you have a team culture that values specific PRs that don’t include unrelated changes. I also find it thoroughly helpful to be able to see the PR discussions since the link is in the commit message.
I agree, much as it's a loss for git as a distributed system (though I think that ship sailed long ago regardless). As far as unrelated changes, I've been finding that another good LLM use-case. Like hey Claude pull this PR <link> and break it up into three new branches that individually incorporate changes A, B, and C, and will cleanly merge in that order.
One minor nuisance that can come up with GitHub in particular when using a short reference like #123 is that that link breaks if the repo is forked or merged into something else. For that reason, I try to give full-url references at least when I'm manually inserting them, and I wish GitHub would do the same. Or perhaps add some hidden metadata to the merge commit saying "hey btw that #123 refers to <https://github.com/fancy-org/omg-project/issues/123>"
I've seen it be the concatenated individual git commit messages way too often. Just a full screen scroll of "my hands are writing letters" and "afkifrj". Still better than if we had those commits individually of course, but dear god.
The gold standard is rebased linear unsquashed history with literary commits, but I'll take merged and squashed PR commits with sensible commit messages without complaint.