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I agree with you that such a commit has nothing to do in the main branch. But it has nothing it do in any branch that is shared with anyone either. Git has enough ways to keep your own history clean at all times to not require a hack like squash PRs to compensate the lack of discipline of a team. With squash PRs you lose so much valuable information that it gets impossible to use commands like bisect or to have a proper context on a blame.

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I agree that you lose the benefit of a direct bisect but this is usually shrugged off with "you can go to the PR and inspect the commits one by one" which, while not ideal, is deemed a good tradeoff if you want your main branch to only contain big commits each laser-focused on one feature or bug.

As I replied to @SQLite above, I am not saying this is the optimal state of affairs -- not at all. But it's what is required everywhere I ever worked for 19.5 years (and similar output was desired when we worked with CVS and Subversion and it was harder to achieve there).

But I'll disagree this is lack of discipline. It's not that at all. It's a compromise between programmers, managers/supervisors, CTOs / directors of engineering, and release engineers. They want a bird's-eye view of the project in the main branch.

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