[kccqzy]

Yes after I recently discovered that even with squash & merge, the intermediate history isn't lost: they are not in the git history but they can still be viewed on GitHub.

[mkesper]

But then git isn't your source of truth anymore. GitHub still references these commits until they're garbage collected one day.

[kccqzy]

My understanding is that these commits don't get garbage collected ever. After all they still need to support `gh pr checkout` so they need to store them forever as part of the GitHub repo. Sure they won't be included in `git clone` but that's kind of the point.

[keybored]

That’s correct. They will not ge GCd.

And yet that’s not usually what the problem is with having your canonical history “over there” in a proprietary webapp.

But if the history is easily available on those PR refs then I guess it is (under doubt) fine.

[skydhash]

If you really care, you can use the API to extract the PR’s data in a local archive.

[keybored]

If I really care about the version control history? Yeah.

Alternatively I could stick with git(1) which does all of this stuff out of the box. Instead of having to learn a superflouous (for the job) API.

[skydhash]

I mean the PR data. The main advantage of a forge like Github are being web browseable, working great as a backup, and the PRs (and other stuff like artifacts storage and CI). All of these have alternatives and are optional. And the API is comprehensive enough to not feel locked in.