> Surely a better approach is to record the complete ancestry of every check-in but then fix the tool to show a "clean" history in those instances where a simplified display is desirable and edifying

From your link. The actual issue that people ought to be discussing in this comment section imo.

THIS is the hill I will die on.

Why do we advocate destroying information/data about the dev process when in reality we need to solve a UI/display issue?

The amount of times in the last 15ish years I've solved something by looking back at the history and piecing together what happened (eg. refactor from A to B as part of a PR, then tweak B to eventually become C before getting it merged, but where there are important details that only resulted because of B, and you don't realize they are important until 2 years later) is high enough that I consider it very poor practice to remove the intermediate commits that actually track the software development process.

Because nobody cares about the dev process. The number of times I’ve looked back in the history and seen a branch with a series of twenty commits labeled “fix thing”, “oops”, “typo”, “remove thing I tried that didn’t work”, or just a chain of WIP WIP WIP WIP is useless, irritating, and pointless.

One commit per logical change. One merge per larger conceptual change. I will rewrite my actual dev process so that individual commits can be reviewed as small, independent PRs when possible, and so that bigger PRs can be reviewed commit-by-commit to understand the whole. Because I care about my reviewers, and because I want to review code like this.

Care about your goddamn craft, even just a little bit.

Isn't this just `--first-parent`? I think that should probably be the default in git. Maybe the only way this will happen is with a new SCM.

But the git authors are adamant that there's no convention for linearity, and somehow extended that to why there shouldn't be a "theirs" merge strategy to mirror "ours" (writing it out it makes even less sense, since "theirs" is what you'd want in a first-parent-linear repo, not "ours").