According to this text by Joel Spolsky, in SVN-days developers spent days and days massaging code but not committing, because committing meant pushing to the central repository public to everyone. With git/hg developers can use version control also in their incremental daily work, and finally merge or rebase or squash or whatever, to massage their work into a form that is good for pushing to the master.

http://hginit.com/00.html