It’s surprising how Github is sorely lacking in git features and even encourages bad practices.

1. There is only a linear history view of commits without any child/parent relationships visualized. I have coworkers that tell me it’s annoying how I use merge commits because they just see a big list of small commits in the history, and they’d rather see one commit per PR. Well… I sympathize, but also, fuck that! I’m not squashing my carefully crafted commits because Github has a shitty UI. Use git log --first-parent or something like lazygit. It’s sad that many open source projects have adopted a “squash and merge” mantra for PRs. All of the merge methods have a valid use case, but people are so beholden to the damned Github history view.

2. PRs have no concept of what a patch is. If you rebase, the entire history disappears. Reviewers cannot see changes made to individual patches unless they are applied first in new commits and then manually squashed into old patches after the review is done. Phabricator does this better IMO; each patch has its own history. I’ve even heard devs at other companies tell me they never make PRs bigger than 100 LOC. That just seems like a huge waste of time to me, unless you have some special tools to support that bizarre workflow.

3. Merge queues only support a single merge method, one of merge commit, rebase, or squash. So we just don’t use this desirable feature because of this limitation.