There is a middle ground between "retain the history of every typo anyone ever made" and "squash a month's worth of work into a single commit". Without having to learn a huge amount you can rebase your private branch now and again to squash all those typos and "fix the tests" commits into a single coherent commit describing the step towards the feature you're working on.
What I'd really love in that context is for Github's PR interface to surface individual commits better. I want to be able to step through each commit, reviewing the incremental changes towards a fully working feature, rather than have to review the entire thing as one big blob.
It already does that. Click on the individual commit to only see those changes, then click next to continue. That's the only way I review commits, and it has been available for at least a few years
> Who wants to record typos or patch after patch in your private branch? That has absolutely no value.
A couple of years ago I wrote most of a custom X509 validation stack in java before realising we didn't need one after all, there was a way to do what we needed with the standard stuff, so it wasn't in the final PR. Three months later things changed, I did need one and being able to look it up saved me several days work.
It can have a huge amount of value.
Who cares about revision history being neat and atomic? It's not been of the slightest consequence to me. It's not like there's a realistic maximum number of revisions you can store in your repo.
But to the original point, clearly both of these features have a use-case, and people want them. Other source control systems in the past (which were much worse in many other ways) catered for this. But the current tension only exists because the dominant source control system doesn't really allow you to pick and choose how you see the data.
