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On Mac, I prefer Gitup, a free and open source GUI which makes rebases (and a bunch of other git operations) much easier: https://github.com/git-up/GitUp
GitLab team member here, putting my personal hat on - from my experience in using different Git workflows since 2009, a smaller clean unit of work can with debugging and troubleshooting. It also provides a way to new team members and contributors to understand the thought process and ideation to implement a new architecture, apply performance fixes, add documentation, work with tests, additional fixes, until its final release. Most of this can be tracked within a MR/PR and the history of code reviews, etc. - even after the merge and squash and Git branch delete, not trying to argue with this functionality. :)
From the Git CLI, without any reference to Git* platforms, it is not so obvious when searching for a commit that introduced a bug, e.g. using "git bisect" for binary search. Reading a 10,000 lines git diff can be harder than a smaller commit that also explains the reasoning in the commit message. Speaking from own experience and programming mistakes in a small team, focussing on clean commits and a good history tremendously helped in stressful debug situations. Until you hit a compiler regression bug, but that's a different story then ;)
I'm personally still very fast on the Git CLI, but I also know that there are a variety of CLI and UI tools out there that can help with analysing large Git commits. Potentially in the future also AI assisted that tell us which change a diff caused a performance regression in a release 5 months later. Or we don't need it at all because Observability driven development enabled to see these problems before merging and code reviews, e.g. the memory leak but only when DNS fails. True story from ~2016, more in my KubeCon EU talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkREMg8adaI and project at https://gitlab.com/everyonecancontribute/observability/cpp-d...
You are more brave than I am - I have it explicitly disabled :-) https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/dotfiles/-/blob/main/.gitconfig
When I pull and it runs into a merge conflict, I want to see that error/log on the CLI. Reason: Sometimes the automated pull-rebase takes a very long time to resolve conflicts after each step. I prefer to first run
git fetch
git diff branchname origin/branchname
and then decide my strategy :)
Bit off-topic but since we share .gitconfig tips - I upgraded to a recent Git version and enabled the "git push" option to setup tracking automatically. No more "git push -u origin branchname" actions. https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/dotfiles/-/blob/main/.gitconfig#...
[push]
What you say is impossible, we pretty successfully apply at ScyllaDB (see https://github.com/scylladb/scylladb/commits/master).
I'm not sure 100% of the commits compile & pass all tests - there may be some mistakes - but generally we're in a pretty good state, and the clean git log is being successfully used for bisecting.
If you want even larger scale - if I understand correctly, the Linux kernel practices a similar thing, which is where we got this practice from (ScyllaDB founders came from kernel development). And since Git was originally created to help developing Linux - that's where you want to look for good practices.
Today I learned, thanks a lot!
Created a MR for the Developer Evangelism Hacker News handbook to add this formatting tip, and some more https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...
Thanks, great idea. Added a comment into the feature proposal in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/273250#note_11... - suggest upvoting and/or subscribing to notifications.
I think it was this one in an earlier version. https://github.com/sjurba/rebase-editor