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gitgit-mergesquash

Merge a branch, but dont fill gitk with noise BUT dont lie about where it came from

Im' probably doing this wrong or misunderstanding something here but basically I do not want to fill our master branch with noise but i do not want to lie about my history.

So we have a master branch and a dev branch

In this case we also have a feature branch full of both important and seemingly unimportant (commiting for the day etc)

I merged feature branch onto the dev branch because i do not mind the noise on the dev branch. however now that i am merging dev branch onto master, i would rather not have all that noise from my feature branch.

I thought merge --squash dev_branch was the answer but that seems to act as if i had a sudden flash of brilliance and did all that work in one night with absolutely no reference to the fact it was a merge and in gitk there is no mention of the feature branch at all.

I want to bring in the change so that in gitk all you would see is "merged feature" or "merged dev_branch" but without all the noise underneath

I could use git rebase on the dev_branch to clean up the commits made from feature branch, this way i could still keep the changes as they were in feature without any lies and prettify it in dev_branch...but this seems wrong too

So far the best solution i have come up with is to do git merge --squash dev_branch

and just make the comment "Look at feature branch for more detailed history"

Am i going about this the wrong way? should i really be worried about "noise" can you just collapse changes made under a certain branch?

So its not quite Git: merge all changes from another branch as a single commit

Solution

  • I sometimes use the following workflow, which might suit you:

    1. I work in my own repo on a local feature branch (that is not pushed).
    2. I pull changes to master frequently.
    3. Every now and then I rebase my feature branch on master. If I feel like it, I do it interactively and fix up the history.
    4. When the feature is finished, I do a final rebase, and then I merge to master with --no-ff to force a merge commit.

    The end result is a history that contains a merge commit, is easy to follow, but still clearly demonstrates that logically separate work has been done in a branch.

    |
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*   merge commit
|\
| \
|  *
|  |
|  *
|  |
|  *
| /
|/
*   common ancestor
| 
|

    You also get a single merge commit that can be used to git revert the whole feature if you wish.