Hacker News Reader

Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

Um, no. Keeping diff sizes smaller is nice, but asking for "a few dozen lines" most of the time is too doctrinaire. In many codebases, especially those that are older and larger, even a fairly straightforward enhancement can require a few dozen lines of new code plus even more modifying callers or hooking things together in other ways. Oops, already over the limit. Breaking up patches can even make them less coherent as context for each one is lost, and can slow things down if all the pieces have to be pushed separately through a slow CI pipeline.

Keeping patch sizes to a minimum is good, but it's a minimum of what's feasible based on other concerns. If "few dozen lines" works for you that's great, but don't overgeneralize from that.

View on HN

I think the point was to keep your changes minimal, not to break the patches up arbitrarily. So if a new feature consists of X and Y, you try to release first X, then Y, not both at the same time, even if they are related.

> Breaking up patches can even make them less coherent as context for each one is lost

A potential solution: Non-fast-forward merge commits. Best of both worlds: Small diffs and large diffs. (I'll also note that I haven't found this to be a problem in practice.)

> and can slow things down if all the pieces have to be pushed separately through a slow CI pipeline.

And can speed things up if the CI pipeline can pinpoint the exact change that broke the build. Fat commits just obscure the underlying problem - although sometimes that's the best you can hope for.

I like the merging pattern in principle for that reason. In practice I've had too many tooling issues (git bisect being a PITA to use due to infinite decisions, history-browsing difficulty, people getting confused about which commit to revert and how).

None of which are intrinsic. And maybe they've been fixed since my last attempt? But noticeably painful.

I think this is what I really took from that. I feel like very small diffs that lack overall context just add cognitive load. If the context isn't properly captured, the tendency to green light a few changes would be higher when these changes could have significant impact on other parts of the system.

I do feel like this becomes almost an artform. Small but concise PRs aren't that easy in some situations and smaller PRs that address large refactoring in pieces seem to win over one large PR that is difficult to parse mentally. What that looks like varies by project or organization and I feel like one size definitely doesn't fit all.

Agreed - arbitrarily splitting into two commits just because otherwise you'd break the magic 'few dozen lines' limit is just making git management harder: rebasing? reverting? checking-out? Are you sure you included all the commits that make up the single logical 'commit' you're looking to rebase on/revert/checkout?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com