Automatic commit squashing

[Ian Booth]

On 16/06/16 19:04, David Cheney wrote:
> Counter suggestion: the bot refuses to accept PR's that contain more
> than one commit, then it's up to the submitter to prepare it in any
> way that they feel appropriate.
>

Please no. I do not want to be forced to alter my local history.

I was hopeful that having the landing bot / github squash commits would satisfy
those people what did not want to use git log --first-parent to present a
sanitised view of commits, but allow me to retain the history in my branches
locally so I could look back on what I did and when and how (if needed).

If the default github behaviour is not sufficient, perhaps we can add some
tooling in the merge bot to do the squashing prior to merging.


> On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 6:44 PM, roger peppe <roger.peppe at canonical.com> wrote:
>> 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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>>
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