[nothrabannosir]

"history" can be "shared history" or "private history". The part of history that only lives on your computer is more a "patch-set in the making" than actual history.

If a commit is appended to a tree and nobody has checked it out yet, does it really exist?

[kazinator]

Even (semi-) public history can be rewritten. At work, I'm working on a bug with several people. We created a "wild repo" that we share. The branches of test commits get rewritten regularly. You just send an e-mail "Heads up; I rewrote the test-branch". If you know what you're doing in git, it's not hard to pick up rewritten branches.

I introduced the convention of preserving the previous version of the branch as "<branch-name>.1", and the previous-previous as "<branch-name>.2" similar to rotating logs.

You obviously don't want to be doing this on a repo with thousands of downstreams. The point is that "private" can have a somewhat larger scope than "just my single local repo".