Proposal: Encourage squashing commits when merging

[Felix Ernst]

Gitlab allows squashing commits while merging. I suggest to have the checkbox for this ticked by default. Contributors would still be able to untick it as they see fit.

I think "encouraging squashing" is the better default because Gitlab has features like the "Apply suggestion" button which produces non-descriptive commits by default. Furthermore especially new contributors might not manage the commit history in their merge requests. When it finally comes to merging, the merging person might forget to tick that checkbox, or they might have only recently been upgraded to a KDE developer account and not know if they should tick this non-default setting, which will then lead to a bunch of misleading/confusing/useless commits making their way to the commit history of the master branch. Even project maintainers are unable to rectify this then.

The way to change this default is described in https://invent.kde.org/help/user/project/merge_requests/squash_and_merge.md#configure-squash-options-for-a-project. However, this setting is controlled exclusively by KDE system administrators. In a short discussion with Ben Cooksley he quite reasonably suggested: "I'm afraid we need a universal consistent approach across our repositories, otherwise it will cause issues where people get surprised by different behaviour. I'd suggest starting a thread regarding the behaviour change to see what the general consensus is." (https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/895#note_1131215) So this is what I am now doing here.

So, does anyone mind if we change "Squash commits when merging" to "Encourage"? (https://invent.kde.org/help/user/project/merge_requests/squash_and_merge.md#configure-squash-options-for-a-project)

Felix Ernst