I search through other people's commit histories all the time. Commit logs are by far the most thorough documentation you'll find in the typical codebase. Not f

I search through other people's commit histories all the time. Commit logs are by far the most thorough documentation you'll find in the typical codebase. Not for the big things that appear in changelogs, but for the little things like "why the heck does this line work that way?" Giving Weitse the benefit of the doubt, his commit logs are probably very useful indeed, and not sharing them makes the codebase that much less useful to everyone else. Edit to add: the canonical example is bisection. When something breaks, it is awesome to bisect it down to the precise change that broke it. Bisection lets you narrow the scope down to a vastly smaller problem space than a whole release would.