One of the things I like about git is that I can make bad commits and fix them later. If I'm working on one feature and I'm interrupted by another task, I can commit "wip - blah", then check out a different branch and work on that. When I go back, I pick up exactly where I left off, and amend the half-finished commit into something that actually makes sense before pushing it out to the rest of the team.

In the past, I never made those sorts of commits, because I used VCSs in which you couldn't. Instead, I avoided committing by checking out a separate workspace for the new work. That's a lot slower, though, and it's easier to lose uncommitted changes. Committing incomplete, broken work allows you to leverage your VCS to manage even your unfinished code.

"git stash" was created for this purpose

git stash is handy. I tend to forget about stashed code, though, so I only stash stuff if I know I will pop it soon.

The "Derp" commits are the ones made immediately after a mistake. No one is editing their commit history just to fix these idiotic messages, they're doing it to fix the idiotic mistake that precedes the idiotic message. Yes, no one is perfect, but leaving the previous (wrong) commit alone has real consequences: it prevents people from easily cherry-picking the commit, using bisect to debug later, doing an accurate code review, etc.

edit: I realize that there are probably a few exceptions to my "no one" IRL. But I don't think anyone here would defend that practice.

Well then, try to structure things so you're catching those idiotic mistakes before you commit them.

The consequences you describe seem extremely mild. Cherry-picking now requires two cherry-picks instead of one, big deal. Git bisect has a "skip" command that solves this nicely. And I don't see how code review is at all impacted by this, unless you're using terrible tools that won't show a full summary of changes all at once.

Or... rewrite history. :) All of these problems are trivial when the commits are right next to each other; they're less trivial when they're separated by other unrelated commits.

"Don't make idiotic mistakes" isn't really advice that anyone can follow.

I think it depends on what kind of idiotic mistakes we're talking about. Stuff like forgetting a semicolon is completely avoidable with a disciplined approach of, "Always build before you commit." Other kinds aren't so nicely avoidable, but then I think the record should show them anyway.

Fair enough. I agree that rewriting history shouldn't replace other good practices. But I don't really see the benefit of having an exact historical record of all the mistakes made when coding. What does it get you?

It's not so much what the true historical record gets you, but what you potentially lose with the fake one. Do the commits in your edited history actually work? If you go back to see why a given change was made, will you get an accurate picture of the state of the rest of the code at that time?

But one of the points of editing the history is to make sure that both of those are more likely to be yes -- it's to make the history easier to review historically than it would be unedited. (IMO, obviously).

And this is probably partly why there's what you originally called an "obsession" with rewriting history: retroactively rewriting something 5 months old is probably going to be a disaster. But rewriting 1 day's worth of commits to better express why a given change was made, to give a more accurate picture of the state of the rest of the code, and to make things in general easier for people to read in the future is pretty trivial. So why not do it?

Are you building and testing your edited commits as you make them? If so, that seems fair, but a lot of work. If not, I don't see how it increases the chances of good results.

All of the extra building and testing can be automated, so the extra work just becomes a matter of reorganizing the work to make logically cohesive commits and it's more work in the same sense that writing good comments is more work. Whether building and testing each commit is done as often as it should be....

I would bet that many people eyeball it, build and test the end result, and claim that that's good enough. Since many of these people probably edited out a commit with a message like "lol typo broke the build" that might be an overly optimistic attitude ;)

In any case, I don't see how it decreases the chances of good results. You already dismissed my suggestion that it's nice to have each commit build and pass tests, so it's a bit strange to start worrying about it now.

When did I dismiss the idea that all commits should build and pass tests? That's certainly what I aim for.

to be fair, if it's truly a "derp" commit you're better off using "git commit --amend --no-edit", which is technically rewriting history but in one stroke :)