This is a topic is rarely talked about because maintaining history and attribution is valuable. The 'easy' approach is to split the codebase up into modules th

This is a topic is rarely talked about because maintaining history and attribution is valuable. The 'easy' approach is to split the codebase up into modules that can be versioned independently. A more extreme approach would be to store the previous history away as a separate branch and squash related changes with the log referencing the commits that make up the aggregate. Feature branches accomplish this to some degree and it's not unusual for OSS maintainers to request that added features get squashed but they also tend to dispose of the branches that contain the more granular history of changes.