Why don't people use git properly? | deadSimpleTech
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I think the worst failure mode I've ever seen is one team that maintained a "git repository" for a collection of analysis scripts that was simply a directory on a shared drive. It was technically speaking initiated as a git repository, but practically speaking it wasn't used as one: rather, the directory contained zipped copies of the code timestamped with when they were modified. There were very few commits to be seen, and I honestly hesitated to try and branch from them in any meaningful way. Of course there was no command line interface or anything to be had, and the git GUI software they had available was muddled enough that it confused me. In this situation, yes, *technically* they were using git, but in any real sense this clearly wasn't the case.
  • lad@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    And here we are, encouraged by our technical leadership to always have a single commit per branch that is constantly amended. I even think squashing the branch is not too good, but this is a step up from that

    • Feyd@programming.dev
      2·
      10 days ago

      Squashing is good because otherwise you have commits that are unreviewed and broken in your main branch which confounds git bisect, which is largely the only time most people even look at commit history

      • lad@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        Largely yes, but also having it squashed requires better commit messages and comments to show what was done for what reason. But yes, bisect is the only reason I’m fine with squashing

        • Feyd@programming.dev
          1·
          10 days ago

          It seems for some reason you assume people have better discipline for commit messages made in the course of a branch that will be merged, but that’s absolutely not true as a general rule. Additionally, even if the squashed commit message is bad, it will at least correspond to a PR in the forge.

      • lad@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        If you mean to ask what that means, it’s that for development you start a branch and either do everything in one commit, or do everything in several, but each time you git commit --amend so that a history is overwritten and in the end it is only one commit still