Re: [incubation] Contributions via GitHub, how to handle squash commits

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:51 AM, Jens von Pilgrim <developer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

1) What happens if a contributor has forgotten to sign-off? Is it possible to "sign-off" the pull-request?

 I believe you have to ask the committer to add the Sign-off, otherwise you're simply not allowed to merge the patch.

Pull requests are not part of the commit record nor of the history, they're staying on GitHub and aren't portable if your code has to move one day, so I don't think putting a sign-off on the PR is useful nor enough.

2) We use "Squash and Merge" commits in order to reduce the size of the commit history and to simplify the identification of problematic commits (since a commit then usually correlates with a task and a specific fix or new feature). In that case, the initial "commit record" of the contributor is gone, and the commit has to be performed by a committer.

That's one of the many issue with squash and merge ;) I suggest you or the user squash manually, make the squashed patch work, and push the squashed commit as a replacement of the PR (using a `git push --force commit:target-pr-branch` is the only way I'm aware to do it).

That has many advantages:

1. It allows to review the squashed commit - which may have issues compared to the series of commits

2. It allows to better deal with commit message

2) GitHub's "Squash and Merge" creates a new commit, but preserves the information about the original commits in the comment. This information is used by the IP tooling to gather information about the contributor, even though the "squash commit" is done by a committer.

I don't have a clue about this one.

The only thing I know is if you break the "squash and merge" operation into "squash" and "merge", everything becomes simpler afterwards ;)

HTH

--

Mickael Istria

Eclipse IDE developer, at Red Hat Developers community