I totally agree with you, I don't get it either. My only explanation is that as a programmer you are trained to write clean and understandable code. I also try to apply this to my commit messages (with varying results). But rewriting history to make everything look clean and simple is the wrong this to do. The messier your history is the more likely you'll need to retrace your steps (and CI results) at some point. It is mostly people coming from SVN and only running CI on the trunk branch that favor the rewriting approach. It might be hard to let go.
"But rewriting history to make everything look clean and simple is the wrong this to do."
Absolute statements are always wrong.
There plenty of great reasons to re-write your local history, many of which have been explored by other comments on this thread. Moreover, Linus disagrees with you -- the rebase flow is the one used by the author of git.
My guideline is that commits that don't have semantic meaning for your team should be avoided. It's therefore perfectly okay (desirable, even) to drop a "wip" commit in your local repository, but that commit is semantically meaningless, and shouldn't make it into shared history. Rebase!
Merge commits, likewise, should be avoided unless they carry semantic meaning. It's semantically meaningless to note that you've merged master back into your working branch N times since the initial branch point -- that's a development detail that is irrelevant to your peers. It's semantically meaningful to note that you've merged a feature branch into master. Your peers care about that.
You couldn't re-write history at all with SVN, so it's kind of goofy to suggest that this is legacy behavior. If anything, SVN had a problem that every pointless brain-fart commit by anyone, ever had to be preserved in the history. This made the history useless.
> It is mostly people coming from SVN and only running CI on the trunk branch that favor the rewriting approach. It might be hard to let go.
You're being ridiculously prejudiced and jumping to conclusions AND throwing out judgements on things that by your own admission ("I don't get it either.") you do not understand.
Please realize that the correct response in such a case is not to double down, but to engage in a dialogue so you may reach understanding of which factors you're unaware of or they're unaware of, that create the difference in stance. (And no, you can't expect the other side to initiate the dialogue. The way you are talking you present an image of someone singularly uninterested in dialogue, even if that may be unintentional.)
Thanks for the comment. I agree I sound prejudiced and I'm sorry for that. I'm open to dialoge about this but I agree that my tone isn't helping. Anyway, I love thinking about this topic and I'm open to new insights.
