Practical DevOps, Second Edition - Second Edition

The value of history revisionism

When we work with code together with other people in a team, the code's history becomes more important than when we work on our own. The history of changes to files becomes a way to communicate. This is especially important when working with code review and code review tools such as Gerrit.

The code changes also need to be easy to understand. Therefore, it is useful, although perhaps counter-intuitive, to edit the history of the changes in order to make the resulting history clearer.

As an example, consider a case where you made a number of changes and later changed your mind and removed them. It is not useful information for someone else that you made a set of edits and then removed them. Another case is ...