Unpleasant commit history

[reganto]

Hi, I realized that git history is a little bit dirty

suggestions:

• I think we should add "coercion to rebase" before any PR in CONTRIBUTING.md
• ~Squash and merge~

Best Regards Reganto

[bobycloud]

Hi, Could you please clean the git history dear @reganto?

[reganto]

Hi dear @bobycloud

There is an interactive rebase solution for this situation but with that solution we lose a lot of commits. I'm curious to know if you have any experience of cleaning up git history without losing commits?

[SepehrRasouli]

@reganto , If the commits are redundant and useless, Losing them won't hurt anyone. I believe it might actually benefit us too.

[reganto]

Dear @SepehrRasouli

Honestly, I don't have a clear idea about this. But I can think of people who made their first open source contribution to this repository. They might later want to refer to their first contribution, and if we consider their PR as their signature, I don't think it would be ethical to erase that signature.

[SepehrRasouli]

Your reasoning is very ethical and I completely understand it. But, I think squashing their commits won't hurt them, Because we're not squashing their commits with others, For example, In the picture you've attached, Look at the three last commits made by @smoeinbbp, Squashing them together won't remove them from contributors list or hurt what they've done. But still, Squashing these commits might be an unethical idea. I think we should have a CONTRIBUTING.md file to tell new contributors the correct conventions for commiting their changes. This will prevent more dirtiness in the future. What do you think about it @lnxpy @bobycloud ?

[lnxpy]

I'll come up with a solution for this one. All the reviewers should review the PRs very carefully to avoid this history mess. Squashing and a proper convention for committing messages would work initially. What do you think, @bobycloud?!

[bobycloud]

Hi all, thank you for asking @lnxpy, I’m not picky about the commit history in this repo, so either keeping the current messy commits or adopting a new approach with clean commits is fine with me. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all repositories; for example, if it’s an important service, I’ll be more particular, haha. But for this repo, I don’t see any value in cleaning up the commit history since no one refers to it. However, if you think a different approach would be helpful based on our previous conversation, I’m open to it. Please let me know your thoughts.

[lnxpy]

@bobycloud Once the approach is ready and in use, I'll close this issue.