There's a huge divide between abusing rebase in horrible ways to modify published history, and using it to clean up a patch series you've been working on.
Oops, I made a mistake two commits ago, I'd really like to get some dumb print statements I added out before I send this off to get merged is perfectly valid, I just did it yesterday. A quick `git commit --fixup` followed by `git rebase -i --autosquash HEAD^3` and I had some dumb debugging code I left in stripped out.
Then, there's other perfectly valid uses of rebase, like a simple `git rebase main` in an active development branch to reparent my commits on the current HEAD instead of having my log messed up with a dozen merge commits as I try to keep the branch both current and ready to merge.
So, yes, I do think editing history is a grand idea that should be used regularly. It lets me make all the stupid "trying this" and "stupid bug" commits I want, without polluting the global history.
Or, are you telling me you've also never ended up working on two separate tasks in a branch, thinking they would be hard to separate into isolated changes, and they ended up being more discrete than you expected so you could submit them as two separate changes with a little help from `git cherry-pick` and `git rebase` too?
Editing history isn't evil. Editing history such that pulls from your repository break? That's a different story entirely.
Editing history let's people hide information, intentionally or not. You are bold to claim you know what future people need information wise better than them.
What's it matter if you have an extra commit to remove a file before merge? Perfectly valid, and doesn't hide anything.
Caring more about a "visually pleasing log" when you can care about an information rich log doesn't jive with me. Logs aren't supposed to be "clean"
If I want features in two branches, I make two branches. Cherry pick also is bad for most people, most of the time.
I care about having a commit log that's useful and easy to scan through, it's not about it being "visually pleasing". Having a dozen "oopsie" commits in the log doesn't make my life any easier down the road, all it does is increase noise in the history.
Again, once something hits `main` or a release/maintenance branch then history gets left the hell alone. But there really is no context to be gained from me fixing stupid things like typos, stripping out printf() debug statements, etc. being in the commit logs before a change gets merged.
> Editing history let's people hide information, intentionally or not. You are bold to claim you know what future people need information wise better than them.
You're already deciding what information is important to the future when you decide at which points you commit.
Reductio ad absurdum: why not commit every keystroke, including back spaces? By not including every key stroke, you are hiding information from future people!
Oops, I made a mistake two commits ago, I'd really like to get some dumb print statements I added out before I send this off to get merged is perfectly valid, I just did it yesterday. A quick `git commit --fixup` followed by `git rebase -i --autosquash HEAD^3` and I had some dumb debugging code I left in stripped out.
Then, there's other perfectly valid uses of rebase, like a simple `git rebase main` in an active development branch to reparent my commits on the current HEAD instead of having my log messed up with a dozen merge commits as I try to keep the branch both current and ready to merge.
So, yes, I do think editing history is a grand idea that should be used regularly. It lets me make all the stupid "trying this" and "stupid bug" commits I want, without polluting the global history.
Or, are you telling me you've also never ended up working on two separate tasks in a branch, thinking they would be hard to separate into isolated changes, and they ended up being more discrete than you expected so you could submit them as two separate changes with a little help from `git cherry-pick` and `git rebase` too?
Editing history isn't evil. Editing history such that pulls from your repository break? That's a different story entirely.