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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

When I'm ready to commit, I usually have solved the problem in code. In order to create five separate patches that illustrate the line of thinking, wouldn't I have to go back in time and re-create the intermediary steps?

I suppose I could create patches as I am actively solving the problem, but at that point my code may very well be a mess that I'd have to clean up each time.

Of course all of that is moot if your problem naturally segments into several patches, if nothing else than simply by the virtue of being larger than a 30-line patch or involving several mostly independent components.

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If you've completed a big change and can't stage it in separate commits that build upon each other ("telling a story" of the feature development), I recommend at least splitting non-overlapping chunks that can stand (compile/test) independently into their own commits.

git-cola is a good GUI to visually stage chunks into separate commits. I haven't really used git-cola's other functionality, but I really like its visual staging features.

http://git-cola.github.com/screenshots.html

git-gui (part of the core git distribution) provides similar mousey-clicky staging -- you can stage hunks or individual lines at a time.

Basically, yes. It does mean more work for you, for the benefit of the reviewers of the code. Arguably, it is more important to optimise for the readers of the change (many people, spread over time) than for the writer (one person, once).

If you use, say, git, you might commit every single, tiny change separately, on a private (local) branch; then use `git rebase --interactive` to reorder/merge the commits as necessary. This is the easiest way I have found, but it still involves more work.

If you wanted to take it further, you could have your editor automatically commit on every save, with a post-commit hook that takes your changes into a staging area, compiles/tests, and provides a report for each commit.

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