Hacker News Reader

What surprises me about the repo is that there is no commit history before making it public. Did they manually copy the code (why should they?) or not use a VCS at all before (can't imagine this)?

View on HN

It's common to sanitize a commit history before making code public. Old commits can contain potentially sensitive information, like certs committed by mistake and later removed, db dumps used for testing that contain unsanitized data, commit messages could be some value of unprofessional that you don't want to share with the world, that kind of thing.

I find its absence much more unprofessional.

Commits are an essential ingredient in a modern codebase to describe why each line of the code is there.

I don't want to go back to blocks being commented out and code intertwined with comments like /* 6-dec-2016 tomtomtom: moved from other_function() to fix latency */

Can you point to one such project which is not planned from the beginning to be open sourced and then later the entire commit history is made public.

IIRC, the Java source code repositories included pre-public commit history (you had to accept a license to access them).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com