Large pull requests slow down development

• SemanticDiff

  13 38 2.9

  Community support for SemanticDiff, the programming language aware diff for Visual Studio Code.

  

There are some tools that can separate actual code changes from reformatting changes. I am working on https://semanticdiff.com, a VS Code Extension / GitHub App that can help you with this. There is also difftastic if you prefer a CLI based solution. It supports more languages but can detect fewer types of reformatting changes.

• repo

  5 - -

Ohhh yeah. My workflow is:

1. I open a branch. i.e. `ID-XXXX-branch_name-working`.

2. I start coding.

3. I make a ton of quick tiny commits. (I generally label these commits "NO-MERGE: ").

4. I make a bunch of changes.

5. I finally get everything done.

6. I now create a new branch `ID-XXXX-branch_name` from `ID-XXXX-branch_name-working`.

7. I rebase that branch to get my code cleanly formatted by commit with each discrete feature or change getting its own commit.

8. My code goes up for review.

9. I get changes requested.

10. I make a new branch `ID-XXXX-branch_name-v2-working` from `ID-XXXX-branch_name`.

11. I make the requested changes as a bunch of new small "NO-MERGE: " commits.

12. I am now ready for re-review.

13. I now create a new branch `ID-XXXX-branch_name-v2` from `ID-XXXX-branch_name-v2-working`.

14. I rebase those NO-MERGE changes into my "presentable" commits, adding or removing well documented commits as necessary.

15. I now send out my v2 revision to the mailing list or I change the HEAD of my PR from `ID-XXXX-branch_name` to `ID-XXXX-branch_name-v2`. If I'm using a PR workflow, I link a diff between the two revision branches (you can do this in github using `https://github.com/org/repo/compare`). That isn't necessary with patchsets since I can easily do a range diff there. I suppose I could do a cover letter with range diff and paste it to github but it somehow doesn't seem as nice.

16. Rinse repeat steps 8-15 as necessary for each new revision.

17. "LGTM"

18. Merge into `main`/`master` (like actual merge, not rebase or squash merge) and close PR.

19. Clean up branches. Either save them somewhere for prosperity if you have trust issues like me or just delete them.

This looks like a lot but I was trying to be as detailed about that workflow as I can be. Realistically it's not so bad and you can get a hold of it very quickly.

Also with regards to rebasing changes into well documented, discrete commits, if when you are doing your development you make your commits small and self contained, with `git rebase -i` you can actually just reorder the list of commits to chunk together the related commits and 99% of the time it'll rebase with little to no merge conflicts. Then you can just squash those chunks down into your presentable commits. This also applies to your v2 changes and on. You can just move those commits in the rebase TODO to put them after the commit you want to squash/fixup them into and if they are small clean changes, they should rebase without conflict. Things only get nasty and break when your commits are spanning multiple unrelated files and you try to break those up.

I'd estimate rebasing new changes into an already documented set of commits probably takes me 1-2 minutes on average so I consider it well worth the extra 30 minutes spent over the course of the week.

• InfluxDB

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  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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