Automatic commit squashing

[Menno Smits]

Hi everyone,

Following on from the recent thread about commit squashing and commit
message quality, the idea of automatically squashing commit at merge time
has been raised. The idea is that the merge bot would automatically squash
commits for a pull request into a single commit, using the PR description
as the commit message.

With this in place, developers can commit locally using any approach they
prefer. The smaller commits they make as they work won't be part of the
history the team interacts with in master.

When using autosquashing the quality of pull request descriptions should
get even more scrutiny during reviews. The quality of PR descriptions is
already important as they are used for merge commits but with autosquashing
in place they will be the *only* commit message.

Autosquashing can be achieved technically by either having the merge bot do
the squashing itself, or by taking advantage of Github's feature to do this
(currently in preview mode):

https://developer.github.com/changes/2016-04-01-squash-api-preview/

We need to ensure that the squashed commits are attributed to the correct
author (i.e. not jujubot). I'm not sure what we do with pull requests which
contain work from multiple authors. There doesn't seem to be an established
approach for this.

Thoughts?

- Menno
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