> So there's no real loss of information in that sense
It is in reality. Try to git bisect a bug. (Yes, I read the part about the bisect in the post. But thanks, I'd rather search the bug in several 10-line patches than in one 1000+).
Most of the contributions I'm merging in are 10 lines, but a lot of them (half?) take two or more (sometimes many more) commits to converge on those 10 lines, and none of those intermediate commits has useful information in them. The other half of contributions are only a single commit already.
If someone contributes a true 1000+ line contribution that I'm even willing to take (yikes!) then you better believe I want that in multiple, logical commits, and it may even be me that ends up doing the splitting.
I'm sure a lot of it just has to do with what types of contributions a given OSS project receives, so YMMV.
MMDV, and for my current project we have code reviews that don't pass and merge unless the automated CI (builds, tests, lints, etc) pass, so if your new feature takes 1000 lines of code, so be it. We do try to keep to the minimum necessary change, though, and focus on tight conceptual chunks. But a patch should never break the tests, especially not to keep it below a certain size, otherwise how do you do automated bisects?
It is in reality. Try to git bisect a bug. (Yes, I read the part about the bisect in the post. But thanks, I'd rather search the bug in several 10-line patches than in one 1000+).