On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 17:42:11 +0200 Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
What I didn't realize last night: the `staging` branch contains valuable information in lots of fixup! commits that would be lost if we don't keep `staging`. They look ugly in the log but their messages still contain some reasoning about the changes. I prefer to use the current `staging` branch as `master` therefore.
*If* there is valuable information in them then they should get into the final commit message (i.e. the one that squashes everything to stable). I deem them basically as part of the review process of the whole change (i.e. the commit eventually committed to stable) and sure, there is information in it that might be interesting but this likewise applies to all review comments and I would not want them to be part of the commit messages, would you?
Some arguments why using staging for anything than hacking is not a good idea: - The information on a change is spread widely. For someone not involved in the respective review/development process (i.e. everybody but the author of the fixups and respective reviewer(s)) it is very hard to track what the actual outcome of all of the fixups is. Having a single commit that has a decent commit message solves this issue. - The log of a branch with lots of interwined fixups as a whole does not only look ugly, it does also no longer serve its purpose well: reading through it should give a good overview of what the code does. - The staging branch does currently and probably will continue to have some build problems, and due to the current rate of merged changes contain a significant number of undetected run-time bugs as well. Both can make bisecting for specific problems tedious if unlucky.