I haven’t been entirely persuasive here, so I’m reflecting on how to better elaborate my thoughts. The singular word “lying” isn’t really the main thrust of my objection.

Maybe the biggest issue I see still there is the assertions about the intent behind rebase, which means the intent of git’s developers and git rebase users. It’s not really true that rebase intends to “deceive”, that’s not how the authors of the feature talk about it or frame the feature. In my opinion, it’s a semantic cop-out to claim the words are factual and non-judgemental, when the negative thrust of your choice of language is evident, and when there are clearly less loaded words available to you.

It is in that sense - your assertion that the primary intent behind rebase is to deceive people - that I feel like the Fossil documentation is still not being particularly truthful with the facts.

One way to look at this is to ask what would happen if git removed rebase. Right now, if that happened, and git didn’t change anything else about it’s design, it would be somewhat frustrating and unusable. Rebase doesn’t exist on an island, and removing it would have negative consequences, and need to be replaced with other features. Git doesn’t have a way to present a clean history without rebase there. It would be awesome for Fossil’s story to note how the fundamental design is an improvement over git.

I know your framing and language is intentional because you believe strongly in the idea of preserving project history. That is an acceptable, even laudable goal. I’m for it. Git did not have that goal when it was designed, and it’s not fair to selectively leave out that fact when criticizing. Aren’t there better ways to make the point without presuming to proclaim what the intent of rebase is? Can’t the harmful implications of rebase be demonstrated rather than framing it as “fictitious”, “fabricated”, “counter-factual”? Could you talk about it without accusing innocent bystanders of “white-washing” and being “untruthful”?

BTW, I think the Pro Git book commentary isn’t that fair to hold up as evidence for two reasons - they didn’t design rebase, and they are also trying to softly address the very argument you’re putting forward, because it keeps coming around. The existence of their comments doesn’t somehow prove that git designed rebase to “lie”, it only shows that they heard you.