So what are the underlying problems which made this such a frequently requested feature? From reading the various links above, it seems that by far the biggest motivator is that people frequently submit pull requests (or merge requests, in GitLab-speak) which contain multiple commits, and these commits are seen as too “noisy” / fine-grained. In other words there is a desire to not pollute the target/trunk branch (e.g. master
) with these fine-grained commits, and instead only have larger, less fine-grained commits merged.
But where does this desire come from? Well, if the fine-grained commits which accumulate on a PR branch are frequently amendments to earlier commits in the same PR (like “oops, fix typo I just made” or “oops, fix bug I just introduced”) then this desire is entirely understandable, because noone wants to see that kind of mess on master
. However the real problem here is that that kind of mess should have never made it onto GitHub in the first place – not even onto a PR branch! It should have instead been fixed in the developer’s local repository. That is why there is a whole section in the “Pro Git” book dedicated to explaining how to rewrite local history, and why git-commit(1)
and git-rebase(1)
have native support for creating and squashing “fixup” commits into commits which they fix.