The case for small diffs in Pull Requests

[w0rp via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 18 July 2016 at 22:30:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> https://medium.com/@kurtisnusbaum/large-diffs-are-hurting-your-ability-to-ship-e0b2b41e8acf#.h3eo1yvqv
>
> I've been advocating for a while now that PRs should be small, 
> incremental, encapsulated and focused. This has not been 
> without controversy. I hope the referenced article is a bit 
> more eloquent and convincing than I have been.

In my experience, the number of commits in a pull request is 
irrelevant. You can always merge the entire pull request with 
`git merge --squash` instead, and if you have the luxury of 
merging via GitHub as I do in my day job, you can even do that 
via GitHub now.

What is definitely relevant is the lines of code. Once a pull 
request becomes too large, the probability that it will be merged 
decreases. At least that has been my experience. I agree that 
incremental changes are much more likely too succeed than large 
comprehensive changes. However, exceptions do have to be made, 
because there are some tasks which just cannot be completely 
incrementally, though they may be rare.

Just my two cents.