Automatic commit squashing

[roger peppe]

Squashed commits are nice, but there's something worth watching
out for: currently the merge commit is committed with the text
that's in the github PR, but when a squashed commit is made, this
text is ignored and only the text in the actual proposed commit ends up
in the history. This surprised me (I often edit the PR description
as the review continues) so worth being aware of, I think.

  cheers,
    rog.

On 16 June 2016 at 02:12, Menno Smits <menno.smits at canonical.com> wrote:
> 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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