Since everyone is bringing up squashing... There's a false dichotomy nobody addresses here, which is the notion that there needs to be such a thing as "the" hi

Since everyone is bringing up squashing... There's a false dichotomy nobody addresses here, which is the notion that there needs to be such a thing as "the" history for you to get the benefits of a clean history. If all you really want is a linear history, then just do merges, and make sure the "first parent" is the main branch (which you can enforce with tooling). Now you can just traverse solely the (linear!) sequence of first parents, which is exactly the same view squashing would have given you, except without the information loss. If for some reason you can't stand the idea of something branching off your main branch at all, then set up a separate job that automatically squashes everything onto a branch that only it can write to (or branch from). Now you have a truly linear history with nothing branching off it, exactly as you would've had with squashing. And you can always reproduce it on demand. That way you avoid the information loss, and can always do archeology on the full evolution graph if needed.