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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

This might be obvious, but it's worth checking out git commit --amend. Then you can be regularly committing, but to the same commit.

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Depending on the workflow and collaboration in branches in teams, amending may not be ideal. Amending changes to an existing commit will generate a new sha checksum, thus resulting in a diverging history if the branch is often pushed to the remote Git server. That's one of the rare cases where "git push --force" makes sense but also requires awareness for other collaborators on the branch - they need to run "git fetch && git reset --hard origin/branchname" every time, and best "git stash" to temporarily remove any local changes, with running "git stash pop" afterwards.

One reason to regularly push commits can be to trigger CI/CD, security scanning and dev/staging deployments or review apps.

GitLab team member here - before joining GitLab in 2020, I was a Git/GitLab trainer. https://www.netways.de/en/blog/2018/05/24/releasing-our-git-...

I've completely replaced my use of --force with --force-with-lease. It does the same thing, except it will abort if the upstream branch has been updated since your last pull. This pretty much prevents the concerns about clobbering others' work.

After reading this comment about "git push --force-with-lease" in https://stackoverflow.com/a/53011907/1821348 my workflows with "git fetch" first would not work with "git push --force-with-lease", behaving as if "git push --force" was run. Theoretically - I need to do some testing here.

Thanks for the pointer into learning something new :)

For sure, it doesn't work with every workflow. But I think it would for the OP's described workflow.

And I am currently waiting for my GitLab backpack for contributing something (very small, but apparently it counted!) so thank you to the team for that!

Thanks for sharing your ideas, appreciate the thoughts to learn new perspectives :-)

And also thanks for contributing, every contribution counts and helps :-) Maybe see you at a future hackathon :) https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/

--amend if you have a modification to your most recent commit.

--fixup if you have a modification to an earlier commits

rebase --autosquash amend the fixup(s) to the commit(s) they belong too.

(Of course you need to know what you doing. Otherwise you create conficts tedious to resolve in the rebase)

--amend would interact with the remote system poorly if there's a push with each commit.

You have to force push, but you have to do that when pushing a rebased branch as well. In either case it’s a history rewrite. It’s not a big deal unless other people have pulled that branch—if they have they will need to reconcile things on their end as well.

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