The value of a clean git history is often underestimated. I will explain one of the advantages based on the git bisect command.
bisect stands for “binary search commit”
Haha, that is a funny misunderstanding. “bisect” stands for bisect. It is a word. It means to cut in half. Because the command cuts the range of suspicious commits into two, then tests which half the problem started in.
to divide into two usually equal parts
But I guess it can be misread as BInary SEarch CommiT.
All of this can only work with a clean git history containing only working commits.
This isn’t really true.
- You can use
git bisect skip
to skip commits that can’t be evaluated. So if you are tracking down the failure of testfoo
and this commit fails to build, you can skip it. - If all merged commits are green then you can use
--first-parent
to avoid testing inside a development branch. This way you can identify which merge caused the issue, even if other merges had broken commits.
So it is easier in general if you have all working commits, but it isn’t necessary. Really as long as you have green history on your main branch you will be able to get good results without much effort. I would highly suggest using some sort of merge-queue based workflow to ensure that the master branch is always green.
I would generally prefer using
--first-parent
rather than forcing squashing. As smaller commits can be much easier to understand and the fact that commit IDs don’t change when being merged can make it much easier to manage stacked PRs and hotfix backporting.- You can use