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Many of us do a “squash merge” (use git rebase to compress to meaningful points in a CR and again before merging to master or feature branches). This creates a clean history at the expense of not being able to stalk others work at high granularity or get as large a score on github’s tracker.

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Git rebase interactive with fixup or squash will combine the commits into the first one. So the timestamp will still be somewhat reflective of when work is done (on average).

Are you sure?

It seems fairly likely to me that the average time of day that someone makes the initial commit on a new branch would be quite different from the average time of day that they make commits generally. Am I misunderstanding?

Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there is at least some biasing. E.g. first commits happening relatively soon after regularly scheduled scrum meetings. At least if they’re the type of developer who checkpoints after incremental changes.

Stalking other workers at high granularity is sometimes the only way I have to figure out what was going through their head (or indeed, my head 2 years ago) when they wrote this... very interesting logic.

The biggest WTF programmer I work with squashes all of his commits. So every commit is 100-400 lines of Rube Goldbergian majesty.

I'm not convinced that a 'clean history' beats a richer more fine-grain history.

There's a reason frequent small commits are generally thought to be the way to go.

except of my dozens or so commits to a feature branch, most of which are "update" or "fix test" or "oops forgot edge case". But for the one squash commit, it's "some-feature-tag: nice description of the changes (#relevant-pr)".

and there's no way I'm going to write more than one nice commit message for a branch.

You can still get the fine-grained commits if you keep your merges focused on one thing.

> You can still get the fine-grained commits if you keep your merges focused on one thing.

Right. This is what Git Flow does. Best of both worlds.

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