Use 'squash and merge' if possible when publishing posts

[ghost]

I mentioned this in the Gitter chat and was told to write up an issue on this.

Current behavior:

When the CMS publishes a post, it merges the post behind the scenes. However the resulting commit history shows every single minor update done to the post, it keeps the entire commit history.

Suggested change in behavior:

The CMS should use the 'Squash and Merge' functionality instead when available.

Reasoning:

This would make sense for the CMS because when you publish a post, most people (at least I hope so) don't want to see the commit history of the post, it just creates a bunch of visual noise in the git log/commit history.

[delucis]

I’m working on a PR that would allow configuration of the merge_method passed to the GitHub API, which would allow you to set:

# config.yml
backend:
  merge_method: squash

Are there any opinions on implementation details? I have it defaulting to merge so it’s backwards-compatible, but I’m not doing any tests on the string to make sure it’s a valid value. Also, rebase merges don’t seem to make all that much sense in this context. Would it be more user friendly to have a Boolean option for squash merges instead?

backend:
  squash_merges: true

[ghost]

I have it defaulting to merge so it’s backwards-compatible

Good.

Also, rebase merges don’t seem to make all that much sense in this context. Would it be more user friendly to have a Boolean option for squash merges instead?

I agree with this, adding a third option just complicates things. Boolean makes things a lot less complicated.