You bring up a good point. Not all editing is a good thing. There are two kinds of commits: permanent history and work-in-progress current stack of commits. Th

You bring up a good point. Not all editing is a good thing. There are two kinds of commits: permanent history and work-in-progress current stack of commits. The permanent history should not be edited except in extreme circumstance. The WIP stack should be edited mercilessly until it looks as good as possible. In git, the separation between history and WIP is usually enforced by social conventions (e.g. a decree to the effect of "never rebase master, only rebase features branches"). Mercurial codifies this social convention into the repository by marking commits as public or as draft depending if they've been shared on a publishing repo or not, and forbidding editing public commits without a heavy use of `--force`.