this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Programming

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Linus Torvalds on how and when to maintain a clean git history (2009) (www.mail-archive.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev
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I want clean history, but that really means (a) clean and (b) history.

People can (and probably should) rebase their private trees (their own work). That's a cleanup. But never other peoples code. That's a "destroy history"

So the history part is fairly easy. There's only one major rule, and one minor clarification:

  • You must never EVER destroy other peoples history. You must not rebase commits other people did.

[...]

If you are working with git together with other people, it's worth a read.

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[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

This is the reality. You'll spend most of your time working with people of varying SCM skill levels, and spread all the way across the spectrum. Squash commits combined with centralised auditing (GHE, GitLab, etc) add the necessary rail to keep a clean history on main and to make building-block change sets easily revert-able.

In my decades working on large teams of engineers, the need to identify changes by wip/interim commits has never been terribly useful for the reason you describe: everyone has different git hygiene procedures and most corps don't give a tiny little shit about maintaining that level of hygiene unless you're white room / highly regulated.

And if you do want that level of depth you can go find the PR/MR in the central source where the revision history of the dead branch is often sustained (unless you configure it not to)

But yeah, I call YAGNI a lot on git history purists to this day. It's a huge amount of effort and coordination to retain a tiny amount of value that is 50/50 gonna be useful depending on the git hygiene of the person who wrote it. Save your efforts and just read the damn code.