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Commit Partitioning
Since we have many people involved in our projects, communication is very important. One often overlooked form of communication is the source control commits.
To maintain an easily reviewable source control history, it is important to put the appropriate amount of effort into partitioning your changes properly. This is just as important as the time you spend developing the code and writing a good Commit Message.
Part of your role as a Code Reviewer should be to give feedback about proper commit partitioning.
In general, try to:
- Fix only one issue or add one feature per commit
- Break major changes down into several smaller logical chunks
- Each chunk should be able to compile and function within the tree
- If checking in both a library class (or PPI, or Protocol) interface, and an implementation, then the interface can be checked in first. The interface is logically separate from the implementation.
- If checking in several fixes in the same file or module, consider if the changes are separate enough to be checked in as separate commits.
- Don't go overboard on breaking down your change
- If you fixed 5 spelling errors within comments in a file, then it does not require 5 commits!
- In most cases a new driver or library implementation should be a single commit
Each commit should build and function on its own. This allows for the use of git bisect to identify changes that result in bugs. This is a powerful tool so be sure not to break it. Below are some hints to deal with potential git bisect issues.
- See if reordering commits will help to keep each commit building and functioning
- Adding temporary code that is removed at the end of the patch series is an acceptable practice
- Developers are only responsible for testing the build with their preferred tool chain
- If possible test with a Microsoft and GCC tool chain