It's not a one-size-fits-all type of thing; if it doesn't work for your project, then you need to try something else. Where I work, we don't enforce that each

It's not a one-size-fits-all type of thing; if it doesn't work for your project, then you need to try something else. Where I work, we don't enforce that each commit build---it's known to be a good practice, and they're going to have someone flip out on them if they're trying to debug something and they have to skip a dozen commits when bisecting (incidentally, I had that problem today). In that case, it's a cultural thing. If someone consistently commits code that doesn't build, then they should be addressed. If it's a random contributor to a project, more care should probably be taken. If building each commit isn't feasible, then maybe only building modified files (that is, a normal `make` for example rather than a fresh workspace) is better than nothing. If that's too long, maybe build a few sample commits. Etc. In any case, even if you don't build each commit, the history is still useful.