Net removal of 1500 LoC…
I’m gonna make you break this up into multiple PRs before reviewing, but honestly, if your refactoring reduced the surface area by 20% I’m a happy man.
it’s just removed unit tests that didn’t work any more…
sets the diff to ignore whitespace
Lines changed: 3
The pipeline should handle formatting. No matter how you screw it up, once you commit, it gets formatted to an agreed upon standard.
Some diff tools don’t handle indentation by default.
So if you add a wrapper, it counts everything inside it as “changed”
That’s what “toggle whitespace diff” is for.
You can do that? How?
Pre-commit hooks is a common approach to this, so that whatever is committed gets processed. Another possibility would be to set a bot on the repo to do automated commits after human-made ones, but that can get a little noisy.
Or auto rejected when the format doesn’t fit.
Yeah I think that’s what he meant. You don’t want CI editing commits.
I use pre-commit for this. It’s pretty decent. The major flaws I’ve found with it:
-
Each linter has to be in its own repo (for most linter types). So it’s not really usable for project-specific lints.
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Doesn’t really work with e.g. pyright or pylint unless you use no third party dependencies because you need a venv set up with your dependencies installed and pre-commit (fairly reasonably) doesn’t take care of that.
Overall it’s good, with some flaws, but there’s nothing better available so you should definitely use it.
I’ve used pre-commit pretty extensively over the years and I’m confused.
Each linter has to be in its own repo (for most linter types). So it’s not really usable for project-specific lints.
Not sure what you mean by this. I have pre-commit set up to do linting in several different projects, and even have it running multiple differently-configured lint jobs in the same repo.
Doesn’t really work with e.g. pyright or pylint unless you use no third party dependencies because you need a venv set up with your dependencies installed and pre-commit (fairly reasonably) doesn’t take care of that.
Again, I have pre-commit set up on multiple repos running pylint with multiple different plugins. Pre-commit absolutely does take care of setting up venvs with needed dependencies.
Not sure what you mean by this. I have pre-commit set up to do linting in several different projects, and even have it running multiple differently-configured lint jobs in the same repo.
I don’t mean using lints, I mean writing custom ones. Say you have a custom lint you want to use but it only will ever be used for that specific project. You can’t just put the lint code in a subdirectory. It has to go in a separate repo.
Pre-commit absolutely does take care of setting up venvs with needed dependencies.
Again I think you might be misunderstanding. It will install pylint fine, but if your project does e.g.
import yaml, it’s not going to set up a venv and install pyyaml for you.Say you have a custom lint you want to use but it only will ever be used for that specific project. You can’t just put the lint code in a subdirectory. It has to go in a separate repo.
You can run locally defined hooks with pre-commit, just define them in the
repo: localsection of the.pre-commit-config.yaml, and have it run a bash/python/whatever script or something that invokes your custom linting, wherever it lives in your file structure.It will install pylint fine, but if your project does e.g.
import yaml, it’s not going to set up a venv and install pyyaml for you.Yeah I misspoke/misremembered there. For Python based stuff, it uses the currently active virtualenv or your global python install, so it relies on you installing your own dependencies. Which isn’t really that big a deal imo, because you need to install those dependencies to run/debug/test locally anyways.
You can run locally defined hooks with pre-commit, just define them in the repo: local section of the .pre-commit-config.yaml
Sounds like you’re just googling it rather than actually speaking from experience. Suppose I have written a Python lint and it’s in my
ci/lints/foofolder. How do I tell pre-commit that? (Hint: you can’t)Which isn’t really that big a deal imo
For small Python projects, maybe not. The project I’m working on has multiple sub-projects and those each have their own venvs, pyproject.tomls, etc.
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Sounds like my love life …
Haha! Jokes on you! It was mostly gnu makefile calls to ruby scripts!!! You’ve just broken the build a million different ways!
Joke’s* on you
(Short for “The joke is on you”.)
LGTM
This response is so true and so sad.
Better than “rejected - git gud”? :-P
[Open]
“LTGM!”
- Last update a year ago
Let’s test in prod
Real men test in prod
Reaaal men of geeenius
🚢🚢🚢
Lol go try merge
Just one review request?
I try to keep my changes under 300-350 lines. Seems like a good threshold.
I’m still annoyed that Github doesn’t have good support for stacked diffs. It’s still not possible to say that one PR depends on a different one, and still has no ability to review and land them as a stack.
How is this different from creating a feature branch and making your PR against them until everything is done, then merging that into the main branch?
Making PRs against a feature branch still has the same problem.
Say you’re working on a major new feature, like adding a new log in flow. It’s a good idea to split it into many small changes: create initial log in form, implement user sessions, add SSO support, add “remember me” functionality, etc.
Those changes will likely depend on each other, for example adding the “remember me” checkbox requires the form to actually be built, and you probably don’t want to wait for the reviewers to review one change before continuing your work. This means you naturally end up with PRs that depend on each other in a chain.
Stacked PRs (or stacked diffs, stacked MRs, whatever your company calls it) means that:
- The code review tool lets you specify dependencies between the PRs, for example the “remember me” PR depends on the initial login form implementation
- It shows the dependencies visually in the UI, like a chain or tree
- Changes can’t be landed until the PRs they depend on have been reviewed
- There’s a way to land an entire stack
- When you review a PR later in the stack, it doesn’t show any of the changes that were made earlier in the stack. Each PR focuses just on the changes in that part.
- For each PR, the build steps and linters run for all the changes in the stack up until that point. It helps detect if incompatible changes are made earlier in the stack.
Making all your commits directly to a branch then creating a PR for the whole branch is similar, but reviews are a nightmare since it’s only a single review for the entire branch, which can be thousands of lines of code.
At my workplace, we use feature flags (essentially
ifstatements that can be toggled on or off) rather than feature branches. Everyone works directly from the main branch. We use continuous deployment which means landed code is quickly pushed to production. New features are hidden behind a feature flag until they’re ready to roll out.You can make a PR against your feature branch and have that reviewed. Then the final PR against your man branch is indeed huge, but all the changes have already been reviewed, so it’s just LGTM and merge that bad boy!
You can make a PR against your feature branch and have that reviewed
But what if you have multiple PRs that depend on each other? Or are you saying only have one PR open at a time? That sounds like it’d be very slow?
I suppose it is possible to have two PR that have changes that depend on each other. In general this just requires refactoring… typically making a third PR removing the circular dependency.
It sounds like your policy is to keep PR around a long time, maybe? Generally we try to have ours merged within a few days, before bitrot sets in.
Please, no, I get flashbacks from my 6-month journey (still ongoing…) of the code review process I caused/did. Keeping PR scope contained and small is hard.
From this experience, I wish GitLab had a “Draft of Draft” to tell the reviewer what the quality of the pushed code is at: “NAK”, “It maybe compiles”, “The logic is broken” and “Missing 50% of the code”, “This should be split into N PRs”. This would allow openly co-develop, discuss, and steer the design, before moving to nitpicking on the naming, formatting, and/or documentation details of the code, which is likely to drastically change. Drafts do work for this, but the discussions can get uncomfortably long and convolute the actual finishing of the review process.
Once both reviewer(s) and the author agree on the code design, the “DraftDraft” could be collapsed into a link in an normal Draft to be mocked next. The scope of such draft would be limited by the earlier “DraftDraft”.
Love it when my coworkers reformat the code style, making it nigh impossible to understand what they actually changed, while greatly inflating their “contribution.”
It also blows away the git blame, making it hard to know who actually changed that one critical line of business logic 3 years ago that you need to understand before trying to fix some obscure bug.
I have one coworker who does this constantly and if you just looked at git blame, you’d think he wrote the entire code base himself.
First things first: Your team needs a coding style.
Also: With git reflog ignore-revs you can filter commits that only adapt the style.
And while we’re at it, check out the -C -C -C flag for git blame. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame#Documentation/git-blame.txt--Cltnumgt
At least there are more removals than additions.
Jokes on you that’s just the README being deleted since it no longer matches the code.
What anime this from?
Watashi ni Tenshi Ga Maiorita
https://myanimelist.net/anime/37993/Watashi_ni_Tenshi_ga_Maiorita?cat=anime
My team lead: “I’ll 🙈 review”
My first PR at my current job was about 130 files for the front-end, and about 70 for the backend. This hits close to home.
Keep changes small, we use git patch stack https://github.com/uptech/git-ps
Human made changes is likely not what caused this image to occur.
111 files with that kind of change count is most likely a dependency update. But could also be that somebody screwed up a merge step somewhere.
The only way I see that is a dependency update is if you’re versioning your node_modules or <insert-folder-here> which is generally a no-no
you should meet my coworker. this is one week worth of work. and he still only commit once a week.
and he still only commit once a week.
WHYYYY?
Relatable
Or maybe their IDE had a different auto indent config and they saved it all, then committed it all without checking the
diffor thestatus.You should have an agreed upon format that is enforced by cicd. Prettier, black, whatever.
I do like the idea of mandating
git clang-formatas the Kate project has.
That way the other devs don’t need to change their own IDE settings to comply.
I’m still annoyed that Github doesn’t have good support for stacked diffs. It’s still not possible to say that one PR depends on a different one, and still has no ability to review and land them as a stack.
Had a coworker who was a bit like this. They were tasked to do one simple thing. Required a few lines of code change at most.
They end up refactoring the entire damn thing and introduced new bugs in the process.
Was there much value in the refactoring, like tech debt addressed?
A tiny bit of value, but definitely not worth the pain and effort. It wasn’t exactly any technical debt that hindered our development.
We had other places with way more pressing technical debt that could’ve been focused on instead.
Doesn’t matter. One concern per PR. Refactoring and tech debt are separate concerns.
Fair enough
Or, if the team does allow refactoring as part of an unrelated PR, have clean commits that allow me to review what you did in logical steps.
If that’s not how you worked on the change than you either rewrite the history to make it look like you did or you’ll have to start over.
Very good point. We often do one PR per story so people tend to think that’s a limit.
You should refactor as needed as you go because refactoring cases are never gonna be prioritised.
Not with that attitude they won’t 😛
Refactoring in PRs just makes it more difficult to review. “Do these lines belong to the goal nor not?”. Also, we’re human and miss things. Adding more text to review means the chance of missing something increases.
Especially if the refactored code isn’t just refactored but modified, things are very easy to miss. Move an entire block of code from one file to another and make changes within = asking for trouble or a “LGTM” without any actual consideration. It makes code reviews more difficult, error-prone, and annoying.Code reviews aren’t there to just tick off a box. They are there to ensure what’s on the tin is actually in it and whether it was done well.
In my experience I haven’t had an issue because usually the refactorings are small. If they’re not I just hop on a call with the person who wrote the MR and ask them to walk me through it.
In theory I’d like to have time to dedicate solely to code health, but that’s not quite the situation in basically any team I’ve been in.
I haven’t had any trouble separating refactors PRs from ticket PRs. Make the ticket PR, make a refactor PR on that ticket PR, merge the ticket PR, rebase refactor PR on master, open ticket PR for review, done 🤷
I hear you, but they should MVP the ticket, close it, then concisely collar the PM/lead and say “I know how to make this better and am hungry to do it. Let me address some tech debt next sprint. I got this and will keep it timeboxxed. I’ll also ensure my changes pass QA before coming to you”
Refactors should be a natural part of development or you will have a shit code base
Sure, now imagine you’ve been obligated to adopt a legacy codebase.
Life isn’t a classroom.
I feel personally attacked.
That’s when you set the intern’s IDE to preserve the line endings.
.gitattributes is our best friend
Automatic code formatter with company style rules for more consistency across all developers.
Last time somebody did this to me there were a lot of sit downs about how to properly chop up large scale code changes and why we don’t sit on our own branch for two months.
“How long will this take to get in?”
“Well, two weeks for me to initially review it, a week for you to address all the changes, then another week or so for me to re-review it… Then of course we have to merge in all the changes that have been happening in primary…”
Last time I got this PR I was like, “Okay, I’ll do my best, but you asked the guy that has like 30 mins a day to actually focus and look at someone else’s code AND yours isn’t the only PR I’ll have to look at this sprint. Have fun reminding me about this for the next week.”
