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.
I feel personally attacked.
Was there much value in the refactoring, like tech debt addressed?
Doesn’t matter. One concern per PR. Refactoring and tech debt are separate concerns.
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 have a rule about this (not that I don’t break it at times). I only refactor in an unrelated story if it doesn’t delay deliverables and existing tests cover the code.
And you’re generally right about tech that not being prioritized, but you should have a talk with your product manager/owner to strike a deal for some small percentage of your work to include tech debt. We were able to convince ours that it was otherwise affecting our velocity.
Fair enough
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.
LGTM
Let’s test in prod
Real men test in prod
Reaaal men of geeenius
🚢🚢🚢
Lol go try merge
This response is so true and so sad.
[Open]
“LTGM!”
- Last update a year ago
Better than “rejected - git gud”? :-P
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.
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:
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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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deleted by creator
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.
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”.)
There was a guy I worked with that tended to want to unilaterally make sweeping changes.
Like, “we need the user to be able to enter their location” -> “cool. Done. I also switched the dependency manager from pip to poetry”.
Only a little bit of exaggeration
I mean, Poetry is a lot better then Pip. The only issue I see is that they broke some CICD stuffs farther up the chain.
It could be!
But part of working as a professional on a team is communicating and achieving consensus. Just trying to make a change like that out of the blue is poor form.
Also consider the opportunity cost: we had planned on getting XYZ done this week, and instead he spent a few hours on this and dragged a few people into a “do we want to change to poetry right now?” conversation
Which one of you loose cannons down voted this?
That wasn’t me, but that also used to be me. I learned to pick my battles, especially with complex code bases, and tried to keep scope creep in the name of improvement to like a dozen lines (provided it was fully tested).
I think it’s definitely a thing most people grow out of when they gain experience.
My boss told me about how when he was new he rewrote a whole chunk of the front end. His boss gave him a talking to about how you can’t just go and do that when you’re working with a team.
At an old job I just opened a PR to apply a code formatter to an internal project I wasn’t even a routine contributor to. PR was rejected and I learned a valuable lesson about talking and getting buy-in before making sweeping changes.
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.”
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.
My team lead: “I’ll 🙈 review”
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…
😱
lgtm
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”.
This does seem like a potential issue if the PR is itself implementing more than one vertical slice of a feature. Then it could have been smaller and there might be wasted effort.
If the patches are small and well-organized then this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It will take more than one day to review it, but it clearly took much more time to write it.
What anime this from?
Watashi ni Tenshi Ga Maiorita
https://myanimelist.net/anime/37993/Watashi_ni_Tenshi_ga_Maiorita?cat=anime
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.
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.
