Re: updating merge request

[Aaron Hill]

On 2023-01-20 3:22 am, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> Rewriting history is just something that one might not be used to 
> coming
> from other projects, but perfectly fine for our purposes.

It was impressed upon me to treat rewriting history as fraught with 
peril, potentially even Bad(tm) in the Ghostbusters sense:

    "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and
     every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." -- 
Egon Spengler

One might argue that anything in your development branch is not really 
part of "history" yet as it has not been accepted.  (The situation gets 
murkier when people are forking forks.)  As such, it *should* be safe to 
mess about with commits to clean up typos or catch missing files, what 
have you.  And I would agree this results in a cleaner submission that 
is easier to review for correctness.  (I probably should clarify my 
earlier comments that I do not intentionally make my commits messy, just 
that I usually do not stress about them being so absolutely pristine; 
again, I am used to work being squashed, so any niceness I put in there 
gets lost.)

So I can see --amend being useful for the little things.  But let's say 
during a review, it is determined that the scope could increase to cover 
more items than originally planned but that still feels part of the same 
submission.  (Anything too distinct really should be an independent 
request.)  Now, you might not necessarily want to force all of the new 
development work into the existing commit.  Reviewers might even 
appreciate seeing the individual slices of the task more cleanly 
delineated.  In a sense, there is some "history" to the process that 
might be worth preserving during this stage.


-- Aaron Hill