I personally love the graphs merge creates. A branch clearly leaves the main line and clearly gets pulled back in.
That graphic makes it look worse by not using clean straight lines.
I was trying to learn this again last week. I just play around with this stuff for fun.
If I want to consolidate all the commits into a a single message (to create a changelog sort of), which kind of merge do I use?
Another question: I’m torn between wanting to keep a complete history of my work, for my own benefit, and not wanting anyone to see how messy and crappy everything is. I’ve been trying to work in one branch then merge only when a task is “complete”. But it’s a bit confusing for me especially if I leave a project for a while then come back to it. Especially especially if submodules are involved. Is there some sort of convention about how to do this? Or am I thinking about it wrong?
You want to have commit history, not a commit fairy tale. Once you start rewriting history, it’s not really history any more. The stuff people want to hide tends to be some of the most useful to someone looking through the history to find out how things became the way they are and what was going through the author’s mind when it was written. If things are messy and crappy, it’s better to know that rather than have it covered up.
At least a squashed merge I can drive all the chances with git blame, instead of focusing out what “format” that touched the whitespace on 3 lines is masking.
And what this graphic fails to discuss is that all these methods should be done BEFORE pushing. Once pushed, then the hashes are set and if you do any squashing, fixuping, etc, then you are rewriting hashes (and history) — and possibly orphaning other developers local copy.
wait what
could this be why I’ve failed to understand this topic on several occasions? I don’t remember anything about push timing.
before you push what specifically?
And what if you accidentally push too soon?
The moment you push your changes to origin, other developers can then pull them. If you intend to squash or fixup commits, then you should do so after committing to your local git, but before you push to origin.
Once you push to origin, the commit hashes from your local branch become what origin has, and then those commit hashes are now possibly on another developer computer after they pull.
If you do a squash or a fixup, the existing commits are effectively rewritten into a new commit with a new hash so the developers who happened to pull what you previously pushed now have their HEAD pointing to a hash that no longer exists — thus orphaning.
Merge. One of the values of a VCS is to preserve history in detail, and merge is the only method that does that. Also, it’s easy to foul a remote branch with the other methods if someone has already pushed changes to branch 1.
I feel it’s a balance. Each operation has a purpose.
Rebasing makes sense when you are working in a feature branch together with other people so you rebase your own commits to keep the feature branch lean before you finally merge it into the main branch, instead of polluting the history with a hard to follow mess of sub branches for each person. Or when you yourself ended up needing to rewrite (or squash) some commits to clean up / reorganize related changes for the same feature. Or when you already committed something locally without realizing you were not on sync with the latest version of a remote branch you are working on and you don’t wanna have it as a 1-single-commit branch that has to be merged.
Squashing with
git merge --squashis also very situational… ideally you wouldn’t need it if your commits are not messy/tiny/redundant enough that combining them together makes it better.
![[Julia Evans] Combining Branches](https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/0fe7c7bd-b762-453f-bac7-ed2e34d44ba0.png){kind=link}