[wainstead]

In a perfect world, sure. I once worked for a company that bought another company's assets (mainly the code base) and at some point in the past the code base had been migrated from CVS to Subversion and the commit history was simply lost. They probably just took a clean copy of the main branch and started a new repository. "Why was this written this way?" was not a question you could unearth from the repository, sadly.

(Another company I worked for had commit log entries like "I like cheese" so perhaps this company wanted to erase history for a reason. Here in the 21st century version control systems finally get the respect they deserve, though I bet there's a sad number of shops that still don't use one).