After a discussion of various Git related problems/questions/best
practices Bernhard asked me to write up my concerns about the current
Symfony development process. I didn't feel strong enough about any of
these to bring them up before. Namely the problem I see is an unhealthy
amount of history re-writing with rebase. The problems I believe will
result from this are:
- Squashed commits are too big to identify individual changes and the
reason behind making them. Once Symfony2 in maintenance mode this will
make it more difficult to understand why a buggy piece of code was
written the way it was.
- Rebased pull requests lose information about branches that existed
during their development, resulting in commits with broken code and
failing tests. Such commits make tools like bisect difficult to use
because a problem may appear in multiple seemingly unrelated commits.
- Squashing commits of multiple authors drops authorship information,
since a commit can only ever have one commiter and one author. Having
our names listed as contributors is one of the few rewards for
contributing, so losing this information can come us a disappointment.
In general I would like to ask for commits to be more atomic, changing
one thing rather than many to allow for easier identification of change
origins once Symfony is in its maintenance cycle. The commits which
contained bugs and problems which were deleted through rebasing might
have helped us avoid making the same mistakes again when we later return
to fix a bug. And don't get me wrong, if you add a new feature in a
commit, it can still be significantly bigger than a bug fix commit.
How this is handled is mostly up to Fabien, so I'm wondering if you
would consider changing your workflow? I realise that the current system
seems to work well for you, but I do expect it to cause problems in the
future.
Nils
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