ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

Show

An entry

Get it down. Make it good. Share it.

Title

Text

Using git, I sometimes sense pressure to make a meaningful, ever-lasting commit message. Am I using the appropriate level of detail when making commit messages? Is a `WIP` (Work in Progress) commit dirtying up git history?  Any cognitive tension becomes a small friction to committing and sharing code.

Commit often, early, and freely in feature branches. Communicate with your team, and when it comes time to finalize a Pull Request, rest as ease, knowing you can cleanup your history with a clean diff of code.

Many developers I work with love to use `rebase`, and I've used it quite a bit myself.  Though, I've also seen a handful of times where commits mysteriously vanish (due to team coordination and branch management, not due to any flaw of Git).

I'm starting to the following method a bit more when I'm ready to finalize a Pull Request from a feature branch that has several commits that I'd prefer to commit as one.

### Generate a diff between 2 git branches

```
git diff branch_name_from branch_name_to --binary > name_of_diff.diff
```

Notice the use the `--binary` flag if you have files, like images or pdfs.

Then, create a new branch off of `branch_name_from` - for instance:

```
git checkout -b master new_branch_name
```

then with `new_branch_name` checked out, 
apply the diff

```
git apply name_of_diff.diff
```

Now, you'll have one clean commit, based on the diff between two branches.

Status

Series