Best practices for merging?

[Jan Stolarek]

> If there are multiple commits then a merge commit can serve to logically
> group them.
The cost of this is non-linear history. But I am still not sure what the actual benefit is? If the 
commits come one after another they are still logically grouped, with or without a merge commit.

I also wonder what is the preferred way of viewing history for most of the people. I either use 
`git log` or github, but rarely resort to gitk. Only the latter makes the non-linear commits 
explicitly visible. The former two just collapse everything into a linear history and is such a 
setting merge commits are a major clutter. So perhaps that's why I don't like them. Perhaps 
people who tend to use gitk are more keen on merge commits?

Janek


> For instance, in the case of Geoff's recent fix, 
>
>     $ git log --graph --oneline origin/master
>     * e5a0a89 Suppress substitution assertions to fix tests
>     * a883c1b Missing @since annotations in GHC.Generics
>     * f8e2b7e Minor doc fixes to GHC.Generics
>     * 34519f0 When encountering a duplicate symbol, show source of the
> first symbol *   669cbef Fix Trac issue #11487.
>
>     |\
>     | * 6544f8d Properly track live registers when saving the CCCS.
>     | * 90f688e Code formatting cleanup.
>     | * 4d0e4fe Add type signatures.
>     |/
>
>     * b61f5f7 Put docs in /usr/share/doc/ghc-<version>
>
> Here we see that those three commits were developed on a feature branch,
> which was then merged into master in 669cbef.
>
> For what it's worth I quite like this practice. That being said, in GHC
> we rarely have changes broken up into multiple commits like this, in
> part due to Phab's poor support for fine-grained changes.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben


---
Politechnika Łódzka
Lodz University of Technology

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