jcorpac Git History Polish
Your local history is your "draft." Before you push to a shared repository, you should polish it into a clean, narrative-driven sequence of commits.
Tools
- Interactive Rebase:
git rebase -i <base>allows you to rewrite your local history. - Squash: Combine multiple small "wip" commits into a single atomic change.
- Fixup: Like squash, but discards the log message of the combined commit. Perfect for fixing typos or small errors found after a commit.
- Rewording: Edit the message of an old commit.
The Rule of Public History
NEVER rewrite history that has already been pushed to a shared branch. Rebase/Squash only what is local or on a private feature branch.
Value
A clean history makes it easy for future maintainers (including yourself) to understand why changes were made without wading through "WIP" noise.