this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Programming
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In non-minimal changesets, I would miss information/documentation about individual logical changes that make up the changeset. Commit separation that is useful for review will also be useful for history.
I prefer a deliberate, rebase- and rewrite-heavy workflow with a semi-linear history. The linear history remains readable, while allowing sum-of-parts changesets/merges.
It's an investment, but I think it guides into good structuring and thoughts, and whenever you look at history, you have more than a squashed potential mess.
Squash-on-merge is simpler to implement and justify, of course. Certainly much better than "never rebase, never rewrite, always merge", which I am baffled some teams have no problem doing. The history tree quickly becomes unreadable.
What I like with squash on merge is I don’t need to worry about shit my coworkers make. My coworkers can have terrible git disciplines, and the master branch is still clean.
This is the reality. You'll spend most of your time working with people of varying SCM skill levels, and spread all the way across the spectrum. Squash commits combined with centralised auditing (GHE, GitLab, etc) add the necessary rail to keep a clean history on main and to make building-block change sets easily revert-able.
In my decades working on large teams of engineers, the need to identify changes by wip/interim commits has never been terribly useful for the reason you describe: everyone has different git hygiene procedures and most corps don't give a tiny little shit about maintaining that level of hygiene unless you're white room / highly regulated.
And if you do want that level of depth you can go find the PR/MR in the central source where the revision history of the dead branch is often sustained (unless you configure it not to)
But yeah, I call YAGNI a lot on git history purists to this day. It's a huge amount of effort and coordination to retain a tiny amount of value that is 50/50 gonna be useful depending on the git hygiene of the person who wrote it. Save your efforts and just read the damn code.
There are CI tools like Prow and Tide which make it possible to use squash by default while still giving control to developers who want to use a different merge strategy.
Also when using
git bisectaka "The Alaskan Wolf Fence Method" on nasty bugs e.g. causing concurrency or UB issues.It is also a potential downside of rebasing that it can (sometimes) invalidate interim tests.
Not really because I've never seen a setup that requires every commit in a branch to compile and pass tests. Only the merge commit needs to.
Also if your PR is so big that it would be painful to bisect within it, then it should be broken into smaller PRs.