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

Programming

21981 readers
128 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
80
Linus Torvalds on how and when to maintain a clean git history (2009) (www.mail-archive.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev
14 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
[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago

The only rule you need is: preserve history that is worth preserving.

99% of the time, that means you should squash commits in a PR. Most commits should be small enough that they don't need more fine grained history than one commit.

I will grant a couple of exceptions:

  1. Sometimes you have refactorings where you e.g. move a load of files and then do something else.. Or do a big search and replace and then fix the errors. In these cases it's nice to have the file moves or search/replace in separate commits to a) make review easier, b) make the significant changes easier to see, and c) let git track file moves reliably.
  2. Sometimes you have a very long lived feature branch that multiple people have worked on for months. That can be worth keeping history for.

Unfortunately, if you enable merge queues on GitHub it forces you to pick one method for all PRs, which is kind of dumb. We just use squash merges for everything and accept that sometimes it's not the best.