[phs2501]

I like "Rewriting local history seems no different than rewriting code in your editor", that's a pretty good analogy I hadn't thought of.

There are a (very) few instances where you'd want to rewrite something pushed to a shared repo. One is if there's a shared understanding that that branch will be rewritten. Some examples would include git's own "pu" and "next" branches. "pu" is rebased every time it changes, and "next" is rebased after every release. Everyone knows this and knows not to base work off these branches. There's also the occasional "brown paper bag" cleanup like some proprietary information got into the repository by mistake and all the contributors have to cooporate to get it removed. But all of these take out-of-band communication somehow.