[marssaxman]

I've yet to find a situation in which I cared even a little bit about the prettiness of a git history. I am having trouble thinking of more than a couple situations, ever, where I cared about the contents of a git history, at all!

I imagine that people must be doing something involving git history which I simply don't have reason to do, or this "make your history pretty by rebasing" meme wouldn't keep floating around, but I really can't imagine what that activity might be.

[u801e]

> I've yet to find a situation in which I cared even a little bit about the prettiness of a git history. I am having trouble thinking of more than a couple situations, ever, where I cared about the contents of a git history, at all!

For me, it's the ability to use git blame and determine which commit was responsible for a line of code and read the commit message about why it was added.

If you don't keep a clean commit history, you end up with a commit message like "fixing some issues based on comments" which affects at least 30% of the lines of code in the file. If I'm looking at that file 6 months after the fact, that commit message gives me no information about why those lines were added/changed.

With a clean history, you can use the same command and see the exact reason why a line of code was added through the commit message that added/changed it.

[caoilte]

Blame is occasionally useful, but for me more than half the time the file gets moved somewhere else or the indentation changes as part of some other change so you lose all context about the original commit.

The code is the thing for me. And the less of it, the better.

[gknoy]

The argument made to me by a coworker (for why we should squish + rebase all PRs before merging) was that it makes it easier to use `git bisect` -- which is basically a binary search for Where a Bug was Added.

In practice, I've never done this. I think it's that I work on a smaller codebase, or that I am 1/3 to 1/2 of the developers, and so it nearly always has seemed easier to read the code + tests, and poke at values in a debugger, than to use binary bug search. If I were on a larger team, or a larger project, `git bisect` might be more useful.

[Touche]

What's the issue with merge commits and git bisect?

[daigoba66]

I think, based reading comments and articles from various sources, it's all because of GitHub pull requests. A lot of people seem to rather a pull request be represented as a single commit.

But I'm in your camp: I work with teams using git (and GitHub as a central repository), and a non-linear history has literally never been an issue. Even ugly graphs 7-10 histories wide aren't an issue. We also don't do pull requests (because we would we?).

We don't have a hard time with code reviews just using GitHub's commit history or even Gitk. In fact merge-commits often sometimes useful as markers of when the developer integrated his/her changes.

Admittedly, I'll occasionally do a rebase of upstream changes before I push if I know the change I made was small an isolated - but I certainly don't encourage other developers to do it.

[Touche]

I sort of feel the same way. The whole "prettiness" thing seems like a bit of a fetishism more than about productivity. Sort of like how people fetishize "inbox zero" (but in that case I do see the productivity gain).

I want my git history to be like my server logs, verbose. I can use tooling to reduce the noise and find what I need.