I have often been happy to have a clean linear history when asking myself things like "does build X.Y.Z include this buggy change I found in commit abcdefg?". W

I have often been happy to have a clean linear history when asking myself things like "does build X.Y.Z include this buggy change I found in commit abcdefg?". With a history full of merges, where a commit from 1st of January might be merged only on the 20th of July, this gets MUCH harder to answer. This is especially true if you have multiple repos and builds from each one, such that you can't just checkout the commit for build X.Y.Z and easily check if the code contains that or not (you'd have to track through dependency builds, checkout those other dependencies, possibly repeat for multiple levels). If the date of a commit always reflects the date it made it into the common branch, a quick git log can tell you the basic info a lot of the time.