just rewrite history for aesthetic reasons, what could go wrong?
I have never understood the problem that some people have with the idea of rewriting history. It's as if the very idea of it offends them. Do file system writes also put you off? Is it important that I see the history of every single keystroke you made while twiddling with your config file? When you fixed a typo you made in a comment before publishing your change, how is this not a "rewrite of history for aesthetic reasons"? Do you really need to know about all the tens of little WIP commits I made because I just wanted to back up my changes before going to the bathroom? Am I not allowed to clean up a little bit before I publish all my own changes to the world?
Now if you're just talking about rewriting published history, then nobody is going to disagree with you.
What people are really saying when they say you shouldn't write history is that your SCM shouldn't support work in progress checkins. Not supporting that just makes your SCM inflexible.
I see the ability to change local history as a huge benefit. Not only can I track changes but before I publish them I can make decisions about how to make them more presentable/understandable to other developers.
Exactly this. I get all the benefits of a DVCS, pushing and pulling from my private fork, distributing development between my home and office machines, never losing changes; and then when I'm ready to publish, I can go back and rationalize my commits (many of which are "git commit -am 'oh sbt'" sorts of things) into a useful history and issue a PR for the rest of the team to code review.
It's taken me a while to come around, but you'd have to pry rebase out of my cold dead hands now.
Sadly, Git users frequently do rewrite published history, by merging branches via "git rebase" followed by a fast-forward merge (i.e. replaying the branch on top of the target), all to maintain that wonderful linear "history". And that's a bad thing because it destroys information about the context in which a change was made. (I've been baffled a few times by apparently bad commits, before realizing they were rebased and did make sense originally.)
If they're rewriting published history, it's even worse than that, because it could change history that you are currently developing on top of, requiring some more advanced git knowledge to get your local repository into a correct state.
I have not found it to happen often though, for two reasons. First, it is widely agreed upon among almost all mildly experienced to highly experienced Git users that rewriting published history is a bad thing. Second, if it becomes a problem with new Git users doing this, you can turn of non-ff updates in the public repository, thereby disallowing this to ever happen, unless you go through all the steps to delete and recreate a branch.
If you're working with your local unpublished history, then it is your responsibility to make sure they still make sense in the context of newer updates from the public repo regardless of whether you rebase or merge. I can see how it would be confusing if people failed at this. I tend to find that more confusion results from people inflating the history with loads of one-commit merge bubbles everywhere rather than just rebasing their small changes.
I have never understood the problem that some people have with the idea of rewriting history. It's as if the very idea of it offends them. Do file system writes also put you off? Is it important that I see the history of every single keystroke you made while twiddling with your config file? When you fixed a typo you made in a comment before publishing your change, how is this not a "rewrite of history for aesthetic reasons"? Do you really need to know about all the tens of little WIP commits I made because I just wanted to back up my changes before going to the bathroom? Am I not allowed to clean up a little bit before I publish all my own changes to the world?
Now if you're just talking about rewriting published history, then nobody is going to disagree with you.