Re: Access to CVS

[Aaron Schrab <aaron@schrab.com>]

At 02:13 -0500 07 Dec 2012, Alex Ogier <alex.ogier@gmail.com> wrote:
>For pull requests that originate outside of patches, a convenient work flow
>is to have the committer merge with 'git merge --squash' as a matter of
>course. This way allows all of the advantages of distributed version
>control while still keeping mainline history a linear sequence of clean
>patches you can bisect to.

While that would take care of the problem that I mentioned about, 
bisecting to a commit that doesn't mention a mailing list sequence 
number I believe it creates more, worse issues.

With that a change set that involved a number of commits would be 
reduced to a single one, so bisecting to that wouldn't give as much 
information about the actual change which caused the problem.  It also 
loses the finer-grained information about the changes for other 
purposes.

Also, this would not be convenient for the submitter of the pull 
request.  If a normal merge is done, it is easy for the submitter (or 
other people) to determine that the branch was fully merged, since the 
submitted commits are part of the history.  With --squash, if the 
submitter wants to determine if the changes were merged as-is or if 
further modifications were done a more thorough examination would need 
to be done, especially if the merge was done on top of a different 
commit than where the original branch was based.