Found a team using Git in a weird, ugly way. I can’t find out why. Hopefully there is at least one reason. I know I shouldn’t interfere other people’s business but I just got too curious.
The Normal Way
Probably the normal way of using Git is:
- Checkout a new branch from develop branch and do something on that feature branch
- Other people merged new commits to develop so rebase on develop
- Squash merge to develop
And there you go, a clean commit history.
The Weird Way
There are two feature branches, A and B, that are both based on develop. Branch A will be merged to develop earlier as planned.
What the team has been doing is:
- Feature A merge —no-ff to develop
- Develop merge to feature B to keep it up-to-date
- Feature B merge —no-ff to develop
They have really gross commit history. The lines are messy. I cannot look at it for more than one second. Luckily it is not the team I am working in.
Why are they doing this? Why stick to merge commit and don’t want to use rebase? It’s fine if they do either merge —no-ff + rebase, or squash merge + merge to feature branch. Why the heck do both at the same time and make it a convention?
Example
I created examples to show how the commit histories would look like using different strategies.
TLDR: Squash merge or rebase. The best is using both.
The command for showing the graph:
git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph
First, merge branch fix to branch main. Then merge main to branch feature. Lastly merge feature to main. The history looks like this:
* 06570d5 (HEAD -> feature) Merge branch 'main' into feature
|\
| * 8400a70 (main) Merge branch 'fix'
| |\
| | * a56ef6e (fix) fix 1st commit
| |/
* / c66ba4f feature 1st commit
|/
* 04720df 2nd commit
* e960e90 1 commit
(END)Squash Merge
If I squash merge feature into main:
* 227ea1d (HEAD -> main) squash merge feature into main
| * 06570d5 (feature) Merge branch 'main' into feature
| |\
| |/
|/|
* | 8400a70 Merge branch 'fix'
|\ \
| * | a56ef6e (fix) fix 1st commit
|/ /
| * c66ba4f feature 1st commit
|/
* 04720df 2nd commit
* e960e90 1 commit
(END)Looks messy because the branches are not deleted. After removing them:
* 227ea1d (HEAD -> main) squash merge feature into main
* 8400a70 Merge branch 'fix'
|\
| * a56ef6e fix 1st commit
|/
* 04720df 2nd commit
* e960e90 1 commit
(END)Merge —no-ff
If merge main to another branch and merge —no-ff back to main:
* 597de80 (HEAD -> main) Merge branch 'chore'
|\
| * 484492e (chore) Merge branch 'main' into chore
| |\
| |/
|/|
* | cd82466 main 3rd
| * b88a551 chore 1st commit
|/
* 227ea1d squash merge feature into main
* 8400a70 Merge branch 'fix'
|\
| * a56ef6e fix 1st commit
|/
* 04720df 2nd commit
* e960e90 1 commit
(END)Deleting the ‘chore’ branch does not help:
* 597de80 (HEAD -> main) Merge branch 'chore'
|\
| * 484492e Merge branch 'main' into chore
| |\
| |/
|/|
* | cd82466 main 3rd
| * b88a551 chore 1st commit
|/
* 227ea1d squash merge feature into main
* 8400a70 Merge branch 'fix'
|\
| * a56ef6e fix 1st commit
|/
* 04720df 2nd commit
* e960e90 1 commit
(END)