this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
83 points (98.8% liked)

Programming

22019 readers
276 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
UlrikHD@programming.dev
83
Linus Torvalds on how and when to maintain a clean git history (2009) (www.mail-archive.com)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I want clean history, but that really means (a) clean and (b) history.

People can (and probably should) rebase their private trees (their own work). That's a cleanup. But never other peoples code. That's a "destroy history"

So the history part is fairly easy. There's only one major rule, and one minor clarification:

  • You must never EVER destroy other peoples history. You must not rebase commits other people did.

[...]

If you are working with git together with other people, it's worth a read.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Commit separation that is useful for review will also be useful for history.

Also when using git bisect aka "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.

[โ€“] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago

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.