[zrail]

It's not like there are clean independent commits just floating around in there with the junk. It's the amalgamation of the junk that produces the clean commits, thus the need for rebase. As someone else in this thread talked about, being able to tweak my commit history has changed the way I've approached coding. I commit often because I know I'll be able to go back and rewrite history before other people have a chance to look at it.

[EGreg]

I'm just asking, why can't you make a new branch and merge-commit every 3rd commit to it, with a better message? It would preserve the philosophical "involatility" of history.

[zrail]

Ok, so the philosophical "involatility" is preserved, sure, but that's rather a large amount of work to do to preserve unworkable deadends and silly commit messages and broken builds and the like.

Also, it introduces a huge non-linear mess into the commit history that can be hard to untangle. Just looking at topic branches in a normal tree with gitk can be hard. Can you imagine looking at topic branches and these junk branches at the same time?