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.
Shared branches should always only move forward. Most Git-* systems support stuff like protected branches.
I personally like tidying up your own feature branch with rebasing and then merging it into main (preferably using only FF merges). However this is not scalable for some larger projects, and for example monorepos also make this hard to accomplish. In those cases the solution ends up being squash+merge.
The extra information about the squashed commits is usually persisted to these systems (GitHub PRs, GitLab MRs, etc) so you don’t really lose much, I guess. Although I do prefer keeping it all in plain git.
I’ve tended to rebase before anything else. If I feel unsure about the massive interactive rebase fuckery I’m about to embark on, I just make another branch where I start. Then undoing it’s fairly trivial.
I’m only just embarking on my git journey as a hobbyist. When programming was my career, I was a solo programmer and subversion was almost overkill.
When I look at the diagram of “merge” I see what I would have thought to be perfection itself, not something pain inducing.
As I said, I’m just getting started. Is there no tooling to make this graph painless and useful or is it left to mental visualisations?
Just use merge with informative PR titles, descriptions and linked work items. Reviewing history is then trivial and it has none of the pitfalls for less experienced devs.
Squash4Lyfe
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.
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.
![[Julia Evans] Combining Branches](https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/0fe7c7bd-b762-453f-bac7-ed2e34d44ba0.png){kind=link}