[lixtra]

I find it okay to rewrite public history in short lived feature branches. It’s typically your branch after all.

So it would change your advice to: Don’t rewrite public Git history unless you can assume it’s read only.

Patches for Linux get rewritten all the time till they are finally merged.

[broodbucket]

That's not public git history though, those are just patches on mailing lists. Even before it goes into maintainer's lists, in my experience it's extremely rare that a maintainer will force push to their own public -next branch.

[lixtra]

EDIT: parent is right.

I see about 600 pull requests on github[1]. My understanding was that Linus moved away from mailing lists some time ago. But then I'm not involved in kernel hacking.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls

[saagarjha]

The Linux kernel has a bot that reminds people that kernel development happens on the mailing list: https://github.com/KernelPRBot. Since GitHub does not allow for disabling the pull requests tab, the pull requests invariably get closed.

[clarry]

Did you ever look at any one of these PRs?