[gbacon]

There’s a vast middle ground between those two extremes. Some history is worth keeping, and some is not. Noise commits are of the form “forgot a closing paren,” “comment/uncomment section while debugging,” “finally got it to compile,” “checkpoint,” “fix typo,” or “going home for the day.”

Code and by extension history should be easy for humans to read. For that reason, the signal is very much worth keeping and polishing, but the noise is not. Documentation of false starts, appealing but ultimately problematic design choices, and “why” information belong in comments, commit messages, or design documents — explicit rather than implicitly littered around the history.