I use interactive rebases to clean up the history of messy branches so they can be reviewed commit by commit, with each commit representing one logical unit or type of change.

Mind you, getting those wrong is a quick way to making commits disappear into nothingness. Still useful if you're careful. (Or you can just create a second temporary branch you can fall back onto of you need up your first once.)

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This 100%. I hate getting added to a PR for review with testing commits in the history, and I'm expected to clean those up before merging into main.

[–] Zangoose@lemmy.one 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I feel like squash and merge on GitHub/GitLab is nicer for that anyway though, it makes the main branch so much cleaner automatically

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

If you're using "trunk-based development" (everything is a PR branch or in main), this works great.

If you're using GitFlow, it can make PRs between the major prod/dev/staging branches super messy. It would be nice if GitHub would let you define which merge strategies are allowed per-branch, but that's not a thing (AFAIK). So you're probably better off not squashing in this situation.