[fnordpiglet]

I don’t look at anything other than the merge to a trunk or main as part of the history. It’s not an audit log. I often do check point commits to move local state to a central git as a backup, or commit when I simply want to have a rollback option for something I’m not confident in. I always commit at the end of a day, for instance, and push to a remote, as I don’t trust my laptop or whatever, or worse some cloud dev machine.

None of these commits are useful for anyone, not even myself, beyond the immediate utility. I squash intermediate commits between change sets, and try to only reveal atomic change sets on any shared branch.

It’s absolutely the history of what has changed, but it is not some sort of journal log of every event in my development workflow the shared branch should absolutely be the evolved history of the source code, but without reflecting the work style of any one developer. It should be a comprehensible history of meaningful changes that can be independent reasoned about and cherry picked or reverted to as necessary. Every other commit is noise to everyone, including yourself, once it leaves your own branch. Since it didn’t even run in production there’s not even a plausible regulatory reason to keep them.

[hgomersall]

Why not have both? If you can filter by merges, what's the harm in having intermediate positions? There have been various points I actually wanted to have the vim undo log as well. That's what I'd really like - essentially a way of undoing back to time zero, with commits denoting feature complete positions and merges denoting, well, mergeable positions that have passed review.

[fnordpiglet]

In branch based development you do have both, in your branch. But if you’re working with other people, do they want your undo log? Is there any value to your undo log in say 10 years? The git repo on the main branch is your shared artifact, and as a matter of good practice is should be treated a shared resource that’s presentable to all, presents an easily understood and consumed interface, and is free of individual noise. If you want an undo log for your work on X, then when you merge your branch with main, don’t delete your branch. But the shared artifact shouldn’t be filled with everyone’s individual work process artifacts.