This is what I found in our Taipei office “Squash bugs for a better (Life) Web”

Concepts about version control

When using version control tools like git, hg … etc , we all have one common concept in mind that we have to commit often to make sure all stuffs can be tracked and understandable when reading histories. By doing so, sometimes we may break a bug to many chunks and this would make us hard to track at the first glimpse. All you can do is trying to find the first commit about the bug and keeps reading commit by commit to know the whole story.

For personal / small project, I think this is ok. But for a big project like Gaia or some other open source projects, this would not be a good idea to do so.

In Gaia

Go check Gaia repository first, you will notice there are more than 35,000 commits and 470+ contributors in this project. To be honest, this is really a huge repository. There are so many people working at the same time in different timezones trying to make FirefoxOS better, so there must be really hard to control. But after being part of Mozillian, I finally understand how they try to maintain it.

Our latest commit history

As you may see, for us, each commit will be reflected to one bug with bug number on the title. By doing so, we can easily understand what this patch is for and what it is going to fix. With bug id, I can easily search Mozilla’s bugzilla to understand the discussion histories and design specs there.

In addition to this, if each commit is mapped to each bug, then we can easily revert any patch that broke Gaia! For example, you can check the picture and notice that there is a revert commit made by crh0716. That’s because the patch broken something in Gaia, anyone can go ahead and find out the patch then back it out !

It’s amazing, isn’t it ?!

So, how to squash commits !?

If you read this line, it means you did read the whole article and want to know something about this ! From my experiences, I noticed there are less people knowing how to do this (I met few contributors and they all messed the git history up in the end xD ! It happens every time LOL).

So, I made a quick screenshot to help you understand how to do this. Just to remind you, there may be some other ways to achieve this, but this is how I do in my daily life.

Hope this helps ! And any feedback or comment is appreciated ! Cheeeeeers !

https://asciinema.org/a/11269.js