[plt-dev] One e-mail per commit?

On May 17, 2010, at 12:58 PM, Michael Sperber wrote:
> Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> writes:
>> I'm sure that those 86 commits are important for *Sam* -- but as far
>> as *I'm* concerned it's all a big blurry "stuff happened in typed
>> scheme"
> 
> If they're truly only important to Sam, they should live in Sam's
> repository, not in everyone's.  The whole point of a distributed SCM is
> that this kind of thing is actually manageable, and pretty easily so.

I don't think those commits are only important for Sam, though.  Sam could indeed squash those commits all into one before pushing them to the main repository, but then we've lost a couple of things: small commits that are easily digestible, and the history of how Sam's work evolved over the weeks of development he spent on it.  While it's not always necessary to perform forensics on the development history of a piece of code, this kind of information is pretty crucial for doing so.  Also, it's easier to bisect across a lot of small changes instead of having a single, massive change flagged as causing an error.

Stevie