How to prevent phabricator from eating my commit history

Question

Here is the scenario that is pretty much annoying me.

Jack works in foobar a software house, Jack is a Working Programmer, he loves coding and commits frequently. Paul who is jack's manager tells him that we are going to start using a new code review tool, phabricator. Jack complies, Jack creates a local branch and starts working. He adds features and commits to his local branch very frequently. Now at the end of the day he sends a phabricator request.

arc diff development 

John who is jacks team member reviews his code and accepts his changes. Now Jack opens the terminal and moves to his repository directory. Jack types the following command to close the revision and merge his code with the development branch.

arc land --onto development 

He sees the following message

Landing current branch 'feature-awesome-features'. Switched to branch development. Updating branch... The following commit(s) will be landed:  b2ff76e  Added the foo to bar 33f33ba  Added a really important check which can destroy the project or save it 31a4c9a Added that new awesome feature 8cae3bf rewrote that awful code john wrote bc54afb  bug fixes  Switched to branch feature-awesome-features. Identifying and merging... Landing revision 'D1067: Added the awesome feature'... Rebasing feature-awesome-features onto development Already up-to-date. Pushing change... 

Now jack opens Github to see his code , his beautiful commits. but what he sees is pure horror all of his commits have been replaced by a single commit which basically says something like this

Summary: Added the awesome feature  Test Plan:  do foo bar testing  Reviewers: John  Reviewed By: John  CC: Paul  Differential Revision: http://phabricator.foobar.com/D1067 

Now jack is sad, because he wants to see all of his commits, jack thinks that this commit makes him look like The Hoarder which he is not. He wants to fix this so he goes to ask a question on stackoverflow.

That how may he prevent phabricator from eating his commit history. 

Answer 1

asherkin's answer explains the rationale for this behavior, and why this is the default.

If you don't find that argument compelling, you can use the --merge flag to arc land to perform --no-ff merges instead of --squash merges. These merges will not destroy local commits.

If you set history.immutable to true in your .arcconfig, arc land will --no-ff merge by default.

You can also use raw git commands if you don't like the behavior of arc land; it is provided only for convenience.

In your example, we recommend creating five separate reviews -- there are multiple different ideas being implemented, and they are not related and seem easily separable. See Writing Reviewable Code. Combining bugfixes, style changes and new features into one change is hoarding.

Answer 2

You should use the native git flow such as git merge and git push directly instead. From phabricator arc documentation:

After changes have been accepted, you generally push them and close the revision. arc has several workflows which help with this, by:

* squashing or merging changes from a feature branch into a master branch * formatting a good commit message with all the information from Differential * and automatically closing the revision. 

You don't need to use any of these workflows: you can just run git push, hg push or svn commit and then manually close the revision from the web.

arc is squashing your commits on purpose.