> There are notable high profile exceptions like publicly viewable patch series against the linux kernel, but you're deluded if you think those aren't edited be

> There are notable high profile exceptions like publicly viewable patch series against the linux kernel, but you're deluded if you think those aren't edited before being released for human consumption. As they should, and tons of them certainly have gone through draft version with "garbage" commits on temporary git branches on the computers of their author. The thing is, that kind of draft version before you even want to communicate with other humans (or at least a high number of them) is rarely useful for long term understanding of the history, so it is extremely useful to have a somehow cleaned-up history in project. That you do some cleanup just before submitting a series by email is just a detail: and even then the rewriting is arguably even more pronounced than most other project because your first version of a complex change is likely to be rejected because the maintainers want some improvements on some aspects, so you submit a second (then maybe a 3rd, etc) series and most of the time you rewrite the history in each (and not just add a new patch on top of them) So I don't think this is even an exception, on the contrary! Git history should not change on branches that are widely used, like the branch of Linus for the kernel, or maintainers, etc. For work in progress used by a single dev or highly synchronized two or three persons, maybe even skipping some processes (e.g. code reviews) while doing it at first, I better not see that in the "clean" history of the project because 99% of the time this has very little value and extremely high noise.