[npsimons]

There's an issue here where people are conflating two definitions of "history". Sure, what happened in the real world can't be changed, but why should we be constrained by that in the worlds we construct in software? Just because someone calls a record of development "history" doesn't make it inviolate, and quite frankly, as a maintainer, I don't care about every little sneeze that a developer had on a project. I want each commit to compile and pass tests at a minimum, so that I can do automated git bisects. I would prefer to have a coherent history of well thought out conceptual chunks, so that I can figure out how things are supposed to be, not what some sleep-deprived programmer was thinking at 3AM on a Sunday.

[IanCal]

> I want each commit to compile and pass tests at a minimum, so that I can do automated git bisects.

What stops you from doing automated git bisects when some commits shouldn't be tested? Returning a 125 from your script if it doesn't compile will skip that commit. When it comes to GH you can skip any commit where the message doesn't start with "Merge pull request #" for example.

[npsimons]

And how do you know that wasn't the commit where the bug was introduced? You check it by hand? Great, you've now defeated the purpose of git bisect.

[IanCal]

If you're squashing commits together and only leaving chunks that compile & pass the tests, what are you losing by skipping commits that don't compile & pass the tests?

Can you come up with an concrete example of where this would be a problem? I might be missing something but I can't picture a case where there'd be an issue.

[ForHackernews]

I guess different people have different workflows. I prefer to make many tiny atomic commits that gives me very granular ability to backtrack if things go wrong.

For "conceptual chunks", I use branches or tags, and don't worry about the individual commits very much.

[mindcrime]

Same here. I don't generally care how "messy" the git commit log is, but when we reach a point where something is notable, then it's time for a tag/release or whatever.