[dspillett]

> What's so wrong with keeping an accurate picture of history

I think part of the problem is the distinction between history and audit. What you are thinking of is a full audit: every change made by everyone to get to and from each state.

History can sometimes be this, but sometimes you just want the solid states and the extra detail of each step between including failed steps that were back-tracked is more information than people want and can result in cognitive overload.

Different people want different detail.

Sometimes the same people want different detail for different tasks. One option might be for a feature to allow you to mark a commit as intermediate. Keep those with the flag around but don't display them or allow things like bisect to operate on it by default. Display them if an extra option is provided, allow action upon them similarly (not by default, you don't want a typo in a commit ID to result in a commit that exists but is not the one you are looking for to be accessed).

[rjbwork]

I think that's what feature branches are for. You merge to master/default after you're done with your feature, and commit an accurate history to the branch.

[dspillett]

Probably, though that isn't something you can do after the fact where a "treat this as a partial result" flag on a commit could be.