How do people feel about making squashing before merging a PR a routine part of our dev workflow?
Reason this came up is that I am trawling through the git history to see if I can cherry-pick things for the 2.5.5 backport, and I have noticed that our history log (even with the help of a graphical UI like Gitkraken) is rather hard to read: we have numerous feature branches that contain dozens of tiny commits, often small things like editorial fixes, typos, etc. I'm very guilty of this myself by the way.
If we could manually squash our PRs into just one or a few meaningful commits before merging, it would make our history a lot easier to read.
As an aside: Github also has a "Squash and merge" option as the merge strategy choice for a PR. While this would be super-convenient and take a lot of the hassle out of squashing, I'm a bit wary of it because of various reports that it doesn't always properly preserve authorship and sign-offs (both of which are crucial for us to audit and validate IP).
So I suggest that for now, we stick to doing this the manual way, perhaps helping casual contributors by doing the squash in their place before hitting merge on a PR.
Cheers,
Jeen
