Is this how you normally would use SVN or GIt?

Question

In all the tutorials I see of using SVN or Git, they always show them updating individual files. I may work on 100 files in 1 day, is it normal to work on many files and at the end of the day, just do 1 commit for all the files instead of doing each file individually that I modify?

Answer 1

You generally want to group commits into logically related changes, all with one commit message.

You should always commit working code; don't commit something that's half done and breaks the build, which could also break someone who's trying to find out which commit introduced a bug by testing older versions. Each commit should contain a small set of changes that are all related to each other.

I wouldn't recommend batching up all of your changes for the day into one commit. If you need to look through the history later on, it will be hard to find the change you need if an entire day's work is crammed together into one commit. If you need to revert a change, it's best if you can revert an entire commit, instead of having to selectively revert a file at a time.

Of course, on some days, you will have a complicated change that takes an entire day to create; in that case, if it's all one logical change, then do one commit at the end of the day. Be reasonable, there are no absolute rules here.

Answer 2

I typically break it down into units of work. If modifying all 100 files accomplished one unit of work check it all in together at the end of the day. But it's more likely that you touched 5 or 10 files for one task, then 20 files for another, etc., etc. I would recommend performing a check in for each of those. If for no other reason, your check in notes will be more accurate and more useful.

Answer 3

It's normal, but sometimes smaller commits are better than commit only at the end of day. If you are working with a big team and you commit only at the end of the day you probably will have conflicts when you update (before the commit).

Smaller commits are better when you and your team do code review too. So, you commit only 5, 10 files and the reviewer will review the code more easily. If you commit 100 files the reviewer will have much more work.