Right, you’ll definitely think twice about committing early and often if commits are suddenly etched in stone. Feels like the wrong incentive/message for a VCS. That said, I believe Fossil may be better equipped to explore a presentation layer that users have control over, and separately examine commit history when needed. Git wasn’t designed that way. I don’t agree with Fossil’s dogmatic stance on git, but Fossil might be workable in the sense that your history of noisy throwaway work can be mostly muted. I think?
I take it the smiley means you know this, but to be clear, that’s not the kind of rewrite we’re talking about. Fossil is against providing multiple/alternate sequences of commits that can represent the same timeline. Breaking the Merkle tree isn’t even in consideration (because a determined adversary can just as easily break Fossil). The discussion is really over workflows and perceptions, and has very little to do with the technicalities of preserving history.
That’s horrible, sounds like a blockchain oO !
In my workflow I constantly create throw away commits. Once I am satisfied with the code changes I cleanup history and open a PR.