On Tuesday, 21 March 2017 at 18:07:57 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
Large companies such as Google or Facebook
A blind appeal to authority is fallacious, but it's still
worthwhile to see what others are doing. I think it's important
to look at projects that are similar to our own, so I looked at
what other programming language implementations do.
- Go is developed using Google's source code infrastructure, and
code reviews happen using Gerrit. On Gerrit, every commit is
reviewed separately (as I've been advocating). Furthermore, if
you push multiple commits to Gerrit, this automatically creates
one review page per commit, and marks them as inter-dependent in
the commit order. This is an awesome approach, and I wish GitHub
made this workflow more practical. Importantly, Gerrit does not
squash commits - you are expected to squash fixup commits
yourself.
- Rust uses GitHub, and all merges seem to be done by a bot. We
are heading in that direction too. The bot uses regular merges
and does not squash commits or rebase them onto master.
- Python: I looked at the CPython repository on GitHub. They seem
to be using squashing exclusively, and only using branches for
version maintenance. However, when I tried to find how they would
deal with a contribution that would be desirable to be split into
several PRs/commits, I couldn't find one on the first 5 pages of
merged PRs. I guess the project is in the stage of mostly minor
bugfixes only - we're certainly not there yet.
Curiously, submitters are expected to resubmit the same PR
themselves against every maintenance branch, e.g. here is the
same PR submitted 4 times, to different branches:
- https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/629
- https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/633
- https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/634
- https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/635
- Ruby uses Subversion, a GitHub mirror, and a bot which
synchronizes between the two. I don't think there's anything we
can learn from here.
- OCaml uses GitHub PRs and regular git merges.
- Clang and GHC use Phabricator. I'm not too familiar with it,
but I understand it's not too different from Gerrit: it creates
one review per commit, and you can push multiple commits at once
which will do the right thing.
To sum it up, I don't think we're doing anything too weird.
Though it would be nice if GitHub's UI were to improve to better
handle this workflow, I don't think it makes sense to force
submitters to go through the busywork of creating one PR per
commit for many cases.
