I am not being dismissive. If you provide functionality that allows the user to delete something without actually deleting it, what's the point of pretending th

I am not being dismissive. If you provide functionality that allows the user to delete something without actually deleting it, what's the point of pretending that you can delete things? Usually when people want to delete commits, it's because they committed something like a secret, and really do want to delete it. Git doesn't try to hide the fact that the committed data is immutable, and to accomplish "deletion" the only option is to rewrite the entire affected part of the datastructure and garbage-collect anything that's unreferenced. You can not modify a commit. You can only create new commits and manipulate references to them. This is fundamentally what enables git to function in a distributed manner, since the only state between repositories that needs special logic are the references; the actual data could be blindly synced with rsync or something, because it practically speaking can't ever conflict. In order to have useful global non-hash commit identifiers, you would need a separate data structure of references that somehow decides which commits are identical, and is capable of reconciling conflicts globally across all clones of a git repository. I'm pretty sure that this isn't even in theory possible for the general case. As for signoffs, a change in history might make a change you signed off broken or completely irrelevant, so yes, I do think that a change in history can invalidate a signoff on a commit.