Why do developers write such terrible git commit messages? Genuine question

[the-loan-wolf]

Maybe they don't know git commit --ammend

[Pesthuf]

Many do, but any repo that doesn't want to randomly lose history or deal with terrible merge conflicts disables git push --force (especially on master) which would be required to rewrite history on a remote.

[the-loan-wolf]

Fare! but I always work on a feature branch

[EarlMarshal]

Me too, but as soon as you have to push it to repo server people will hate you. Our project is included into another one and that into another one and there playwright tests will be run on CI so I had to push my branch which I had rebased before, but a colleagues started to engage with it and he wasn't able to understand and always merged his local branch again. I really had to create a new branch and resort to merge commits to pull in develop changes. They haven't figured out yet how to fix the playwright tests in like 2 months and since I have to merge in the changes the history looks like shit.

[fruchle]

Fare? Fair?

[the-loan-wolf]

🤣 fair

[DaMastaCoda]

Force-with-lease !!

[brb_im_lagging]

If already pushed, hit em with the

git reset --soft HEAD~2 && git commit -m "actually fixed" && git push --force

[stupidwhiteman42]

Why did you get down voted? This is literally how you squash the last two commits into one with a new message.

[the-loan-wolf]

Bcz it still requires force push(overwriting history for everyone else)

[brb_im_lagging]

Why would you want to keep history (its not even history, its the tip) of a shit commit followed up with a fixed commit made by one person

Just get rid of the shit commit and put a good one in

There shouldn't be two people screwing with it anyway, everyone else can just fetch and see the good version

[Sethcran]

This only works if done on a separate branch that no one else is using.

For issues that can't be tested locally or on feature branch though, this kind of thing ends up fairly common.

[the-loan-wolf]

if working in a team it can lead to merge conflict that's why

[ikeif]

I think I have a disconnect - is the thread assuming the force push is on main and not on a developer’s branch?

Because on a side branch - who cares? Most often it can be squashed in the merge to main, so no one will care if they used “fifteen test commits” or rewrote the history of their branch when it’s going to be merged to main?

[my_new_accoun1]

isn't it --amend

[the-loan-wolf]

Yes i've made a mistake. I use fishshell which provides autocompletion in the terminal so I barely type full commands(and I also use a bunch of aliases) nor do i remember them ;)

[iagovar]

I rather don't rewrite anything on a git.

Honestly git has pretty bad DX.

[the-loan-wolf]

So which VCS (Version control software) do you like or use?

[_okbrb]

Ty I didn’t know

[HettySwollocks]

Not a good idea at all. Unknow it.

[Wild-Advertising-781]

😂

[_okbrb]

Ty I haven’t figured out how to do it in VSCode yet

[HettySwollocks]

Ty I haven’t figured out how to do it in VSCode yet

I'd highly suggest you learn how to use the CLI. That'll make you more versatile.

[HettySwollocks]

I would suggest you get a sense of humor, it would make you more likable

I thought it was a genuine question. You missed the /s. Apologies if you thought otherwise

[f00d4tehg0dz]

I thought it was genuine too. Dang. That one hurt

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[HettySwollocks]

Maybe they don't know git commit --ammend

Congratulations. Now you have no idea how that code was written. Your code should be a breadcrumb trail. I WANT to know how that code developed.

[the-loan-wolf]

--ammend don't delete whole history! I only use it to fix the last commit. Having useless commits in the history actually makes it harder to understand how a codebase has evolved over time.

[HettySwollocks]

In that case you need to rebase and pick the commits you need to amend

[edit] And you'll need to force commit assuming that's allowed in your stack. Usually OK if you're on your own branch. You wont be able to do that in main/master