[tommyd]

I thought the very same thing, as I can see the benefits to both having a single atomic commit for ease of reading history, and to being able to see the individual commits that made it up to avoid losing valuable information about changes.

It turns out that the Github "Squash and Merge" option for Pull Requests does basically this – you review the PR as a bunch separate commits, when you click "Squash and Merge" a single commit is created in the target branch with all the commits squashed, but you can still go back to the original closed and merged PR (e.g. by following a link in the commit message) to view the individual commits.

Obviously this doesn't help if you want to bisect among more granular commits, but (without having actually used it), it sounds like a good middle ground to me. The previous workflow I was used to involved squashing and force pushing to your branch, therefore overwriting the individual commits in the PR for ever.

[stormbrew]

Now your history is in two places and can't be inspected from a cli. If you ever stop paying github (for a private repo) or github goes out of business your data is lost.

Or you can use git to track this with merge commits and it comes along wherever you go.