[ninkendo]

This is why, in git workflows with rebases, it's a good idea to create merge commits anyway, even if the master branch can fast-forwarded.

That way, looking at the history, you know what commits are stable/tested by looking at merge commits. Others that were brought in since the last merge commit can be considered intermediary commits that don't need to be individually tested.

(Of course, there's also the rebase-and-squash workflow which I've personally never used, but it accomplishes the same thing by erasing any intermediary history altogether.)

[cryptonector]

Also, every commit upstream is stable by definition! Human failures aside, nothing should go upstream that isn't "stable/tested".

"Squashing" is just merging neighboring commits. I do that all the time!

Usually when I work on something, commit incomplete work, work some more, commit, rinse, repeat, then when the whole thing is done I rewrite the history so that I have changes segregated into meaningful commits. E.g., I might be adding a feature and find and fix a few bugs in the process, add tests, fix docs, add a second, minor feature, debug my code, add commits to fix my own bugs, then rewrite the whole thing into N bug fix commits and 2 feature commits, plus as many test commits as needed if they have to be separate from related bug fix commits. I find it difficult to ignore some bug I noticed while coding a feature just so that I can produce clean history in one go without re-writing it! People who propose one never rewrite local history propose to see a single merge commit from me for all that work. Or else the original commits that make no logical sense.

Too, I use "WIP" commits as a way to make it easy to backup my work: commit extant changes, git log -p or git format-patch to save it on a different filesystem. Sure, I could use git diff and thus never commit anything until I'm certain my work is done so I can then write clean history once without having to rewrite. But that's silly -- the end result is what matters, not how many cups of coffee I needed to produce it.

[cryptonector]

I've toyed with the idea of using merge commits to record sets of commits as being... atoms.

Suppose you want to push regression tests first, then bug fixes, but both together: this is useful for showing that the test catches the bug and the bug fix fixes it. But now you need to document that they go together, in case they need to be reverted, or cherry-picked onto release maintenance branches.

I think branch push history is really something that should be a first-class feature. I could live with using merge commits (or otherwise empty-commits) to achieve this, but I'll be filtering them from history most of the time!