Azure-in-bullet-points

Pull request strategies

• In Azure repo’s you can have limit merge types branch policy
  • Standardizes a strategy for the whole team

Merge (no fast-forward)

• Standard strategy in Azure repos & most other Git providers
• It emulates running git merge pr from the master branch
• All the individual commits in the pull request branch are preserved as-is,
  • and a new merge commit is created to unite the master branch and the pull request branch.
• 
• Trade-off:
  • Pros
    • It gives the most insight into how a branch evolves
    • Illustrates exactly how a developer (or developers) worked on a pull request
  • Cons: since it preserves every commit is may be very verbose.

Squash commit

• Creates a single new commit
  • leads to a just a simple, straight, linear history
• Emulates running git merge pr --squash from the master branch.
• The resulting commit is not a merge commit; those individual commits that made up the pull request are discarded.
• 
• 💡 As individual commits are lost, it’s best for teams that use “fix up” commits or do not carefully craft individual commits for review before pushing them.

Rebase

• Takes each individual commit in the pull request and cherry-pick them onto the master branch.
• Emulates running
  1. git rebase master on the pull request branch
  2. git merge pr --ff-only on the master branch.
• 
• History is straight and linear, like it is with the “squash” option but each individual commit is retained
• 💡 Useful for teams that practice careful commit hygiene, where each individual commit stands on its own.

Semi-linear merge

• Also known as “rebase and merge”
  • The commits in the pull request are rebased on top of the master branch
  • Then rebased pull requests are merged into master branch
• Emulates running
  1. git rebase master on the pull request branch
  2. git merge pr --no-ff on the master branch
• 
• 💡 Some see it as best of both worlds
  • individual commits are retained, so that you can see how the work evolved
  • but instead of just being rebased, a “merge bubble” is shown so that you can immediately see the work in each individual pull request.

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