IMO too much information leads to disinformation. Checking the actual "WIP" commits from a feature branch is a "thin grain info" I've never-ever required.
Cleaner history is , yep, the main reason.
But actually I've faced another issue in the past; there was this repo 15+ years old in my company, with hundreds of committers through the ages, and commits in the order of n * 100.000. Dealing with this repo was a challenge actually! too much useless info at .git/ folder. What I'm trying to say is that "thin grain" info do weigh. Of course you need to reach those numbers.
A lot of people bring up "WIP" commits. Do you often do WIP commits? I personally rarely do (I do get frustrated and use the 💩 emoji, as I use gitmoji, but still make meaningful commits). But the point of the article was that you can easily hide all that information and focus on what you need.
As for historical gits, I wonder if people here ever did a git "cleanup" where most of the ancient state gets culled, and just the last few years are kept. Cruft does indeed accumulate.
Just adding a little perspective, I don't think I've ever worked on a team with anyone who didn't use WIP commits. I work on a small team and there is a lot of context switching that needs to happen and 'finishing' a commit before switching to something else just isn't an option.
I don't like the idea of most of the ancient state being culled.
The codebase at my current job has a cutoff from when it was moved to git, and there's even less hope of finding out why something was done for code that predates that than there is for the rest of the codebase.
Maybe I've always worked at the wrong places, but I've never been in a place where I wish there were fewer commits in the history, but a lot of the time I have wished there were more commits (often when trying to review code), so that I had a finer grain insight into why a particular line of code was written, and what else was changed for the same purpose.
I'm 100% with you that losing this information is nothing but a bad thing. I find that even the worst git commits tend to provide the best and most accurate and up-to date documentation of the code; it amazes me that so many people choose to throw that away!
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IMO too much information leads to disinformation. Checking the actual "WIP" commits from a feature branch is a "thin grain info" I've never-ever required.
Cleaner history is , yep, the main reason.
But actually I've faced another issue in the past; there was this repo 15+ years old in my company, with hundreds of committers through the ages, and commits in the order of n * 100.000. Dealing with this repo was a challenge actually! too much useless info at
.git/
folder. What I'm trying to say is that "thin grain" info do weigh. Of course you need to reach those numbers.A lot of people bring up "WIP" commits. Do you often do WIP commits? I personally rarely do (I do get frustrated and use the 💩 emoji, as I use gitmoji, but still make meaningful commits). But the point of the article was that you can easily hide all that information and focus on what you need.
As for historical gits, I wonder if people here ever did a git "cleanup" where most of the ancient state gets culled, and just the last few years are kept. Cruft does indeed accumulate.
Just adding a little perspective, I don't think I've ever worked on a team with anyone who didn't use WIP commits. I work on a small team and there is a lot of context switching that needs to happen and 'finishing' a commit before switching to something else just isn't an option.
Interesting. I have the opposite experience. I use
git stash
in those cases, or do yougit rebase --interactive
to clean things up later.I don't like the idea of most of the ancient state being culled.
The codebase at my current job has a cutoff from when it was moved to git, and there's even less hope of finding out why something was done for code that predates that than there is for the rest of the codebase.
Maybe I've always worked at the wrong places, but I've never been in a place where I wish there were fewer commits in the history, but a lot of the time I have wished there were more commits (often when trying to review code), so that I had a finer grain insight into why a particular line of code was written, and what else was changed for the same purpose.
I'm 100% with you that losing this information is nothing but a bad thing. I find that even the worst git commits tend to provide the best and most accurate and up-to date documentation of the code; it amazes me that so many people choose to throw that away!