I hypothesize that any numbers-based code metric management comes up with can also be gamed by adequately-motivated developers. In fact, if you come up with such a metric and have a developer who can't figure out a way to game it, perhaps you want to consider letting that developer go.
Were I to work in a place with a 'git commits' metric for productivity, I'd happily commit each line individually, to ensure that any potential data loss was as limited as possible, of course.
To paraphrase Wally from Dilbert: "I'm writing myself a mini-van."
"I'd happily commit each line individually, to ensure that any potential data loss was as limited as possible, of course."
Bah. While where I work has never even flirted with that metric, general agreement in my team was that the first thing to be done in the event that ever changed was write a git filter that committed one character at a time. I suppose you could take it further down to one bit at a time if you really wanted to; once you had the code for one character at a time, one bit at a time would be a trivial extension.
Less humorously, I've been complaining that our email notification system sends out a separate email for each commit in every new git branch... that is, if you are on a branch with 100 commits, and you take a new branch and commit that branch onto the server, our emailer seems to believe you just made 100 commits, and sends 100 emails. Or 1,000, as the case may be. One of these days that thing is going to take out the entire corporate email system.... of course, one never fixes the problem until it reaches that state, so I'm just waiting....
Only acceptable if each commit results in valid code without regression (if it doesn't build/parse or breaks everything it will make bisecting a terrible experience).
Making small atomic commits is actually good practice.
Were I to work in a place with a 'git commits' metric for productivity, I'd happily commit each line individually, to ensure that any potential data loss was as limited as possible, of course.
To paraphrase Wally from Dilbert: "I'm writing myself a mini-van."