> As an aside, my initial commit on a repo is an empty one so that I can branch from a completely empty repo to do radical rewrites and yet maintain a history r

> As an aside, my initial commit on a repo is an empty one so that I can branch from a completely empty repo to do radical rewrites and yet maintain a history relationship with that initial empty commit (which I feel is preferable to an orphan branch and then a merge with unrelated histories ... though those tell slightly different stories in the log). Oh cool, I thought I was literally the only person on the planet to do this lol. I'd do it for branchpoints too except git rebase by default acts very poorly with empty commits in the edited history (deletes them). I wish this was normalized (ie. there was a flag to `git init` to add a commit message for a root commit).