[mikeash]

I think it depends on what kind of idiotic mistakes we're talking about. Stuff like forgetting a semicolon is completely avoidable with a disciplined approach of, "Always build before you commit." Other kinds aren't so nicely avoidable, but then I think the record should show them anyway.

[grayclhn]

Fair enough. I agree that rewriting history shouldn't replace other good practices. But I don't really see the benefit of having an exact historical record of all the mistakes made when coding. What does it get you?

[mikeash]

It's not so much what the true historical record gets you, but what you potentially lose with the fake one. Do the commits in your edited history actually work? If you go back to see why a given change was made, will you get an accurate picture of the state of the rest of the code at that time?

[grayclhn]

But one of the points of editing the history is to make sure that both of those are more likely to be yes -- it's to make the history easier to review historically than it would be unedited. (IMO, obviously).

And this is probably partly why there's what you originally called an "obsession" with rewriting history: retroactively rewriting something 5 months old is probably going to be a disaster. But rewriting 1 day's worth of commits to better express why a given change was made, to give a more accurate picture of the state of the rest of the code, and to make things in general easier for people to read in the future is pretty trivial. So why not do it?

[mikeash]

Are you building and testing your edited commits as you make them? If so, that seems fair, but a lot of work. If not, I don't see how it increases the chances of good results.

[grayclhn]

All of the extra building and testing can be automated, so the extra work just becomes a matter of reorganizing the work to make logically cohesive commits and it's more work in the same sense that writing good comments is more work. Whether building and testing each commit is done as often as it should be....

I would bet that many people eyeball it, build and test the end result, and claim that that's good enough. Since many of these people probably edited out a commit with a message like "lol typo broke the build" that might be an overly optimistic attitude ;)

In any case, I don't see how it decreases the chances of good results. You already dismissed my suggestion that it's nice to have each commit build and pass tests, so it's a bit strange to start worrying about it now.

[mikeash]

When did I dismiss the idea that all commits should build and pass tests? That's certainly what I aim for.