Why Write Small CLs?

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1 pointkaragenit3 comments

I'm not 100% sure what a "CL" is, I assume it's a change order plus PR.

One thing I've noticed with small PRs is that the overall code quality stagnates. Reviewers focus on the small change, so they miss opportunities for abstraction and near duplicates proliferate.

Of course large changes have problems of their own, so I don't know what the solution is.

“CL” is probably “change list” — I think that term for a patch is from Perforce.

In general, yeah, “small CL” means don’t touch a lot of files or lines of code in the same changelist (which is the unit of review and submission to the repo).

Mechanically, open CLs started retaining edit history, so they felt more like feature branches than just staging areas. I think Perforce style branches (rename my subtree using these rules) still existed but were discouraged and not well supported.

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