How to properly use git merge --squash

Question

I'm fairly new to git and only work by myself so I don't use many of the features it can do but I am running into a process that either I am thinking about it wrong or doing something wrong.

I have a master branch with 1 commit (init).

I have a develop branch with 180 commits.

Today I am finally ready to merge the develop branch into the master, I did some reading and found out about squash. This seems like something useful since I wouldn't pollute the master branch with the same WIP commits that are in the develop branch.

So I ran

git checkout master
git merge --squash develop
git commit

From here everything looks as I expected, master has 2 commits, develop still has 180. In my head I now check out develop again and continue working. I pushed to bitbucket and took a look around at my project to see this merge and noticed the following:

1 commit(s) on master and not on develop
179 commit(s) on develop and not on master

Is this just expected behaviour and I am supposed to ignore it or did I do something wrong.

Answer 1

This is expected since git merges all your commits into a single commit, which will be a different one compared to the ones in your develop branch. Think of the commits as a container of a set of changes, if you change the contents you'll have a different one.

You'll either have to accept this scenario, or you could adapt your workflow by working in feature-branches, e.g. master - develop - feature-branch.

Once a feature is done you make a squash-merge from feature-branch to develop and delete the feature-branch. Now you can make merges from develop to master without all the WIP commits, e.g. when you make new releases or such.