I personally think that commit history should be kept as long as it makes sense. But in some cases, you don't want to keep some of the commit messages if they don't add anything to development flow.

For example,

- Force SSL flag when connecting to server

- Use new syntax for SSL flag

- Wrap flag implementation to its own method

- Add forgotten tests

This branch's main goal was to use ssl flag on external requests but ended up having several commits that does not really matter to other developers. Then you want to squash this branch into a commit and merge.

Rebase and merge example,

- Improve sorting by adding cache

- Implement a separate config class to fetch caching times.

- Modify search implementation to use cache config class

These are rather important commits by themselves and better keep them separated in your history.