I want clean history, but that really means (a) clean and (b) history.
People can (and probably should) rebase their private trees (their own work). That’s a cleanup. But never other peoples code. That’s a “destroy history”
So the history part is fairly easy. There’s only one major rule, and one minor clarification:
- You must never EVER destroy other peoples history. You must not rebase commits other people did.
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If you are working with git together with other people, it’s worth a read.
If ‘—first-parent’ was the default way that git log worked, I don’t think we’d even be having this argument over how to merge branches.
In my opinion, the best strategy is to always use a merge commit, and then when viewing master, always use —first-parent which will ONLY show commits on master. This gives you:
The problem is just the default log view of git and tools.