Sun used a rebase workflow on Solaris from 1992 onwards (well before Git came along), and the reason is that following non-linear (merge) history in a project t

Sun used a rebase workflow on Solaris from 1992 onwards (well before Git came along), and the reason is that following non-linear (merge) history in a project that thousands contribute to just doesn't scale well for human minds. (Back then Sun used the awful Teamware.) For sure the tooling then was worse than now, but linear history is just very nice to work with because our brains are not that awesome. Comment threads and code history are vastly different things. The latter in the end is always linearized and the merge turds (if present) encode bits of history on the side. The former really are tree-like, and also not about code but about natural language.