How do you handle not committing these bits and pieces the reviewers do not want to see?
Be it credentials or custom configuration for your local development environment: Not all changes you make to files should be committed.
- Partial Commits
Staging resp. committing only parts of files is a useful feature of Git in that regard. On the command line, add the
-poption when staging or committing. Good visual clients such as IDEA also support this.
One problems remains, though: you have to repeat the exclusion for every commit.
- Changelists
IDEA has this concept that seems almost redundant when using Git, but here it helps us. You can think of them as similar to Git stashes, but a bit more flexible. In this context, the important thing is that you can selectively exclude changes from commits, even if you commit changes in the same file.
- Gutter UI
And this got me excited today: Whenever you click on the gutter stripe indicating a change, you can move that chunk to a separate changelist. This is way more robust than interactive commits: I can decide not to commit a change while working, and I can not forget later to exclude it.
