> Surely you can understand the difference between omitting less interesting points along a timeline and literally changing what was recorded retroactively for points that have been selected as meaningful along that timeline?

You know, the word "history" might be abused by git as much as the word "friend" is by facebook.

BTW, I never really got an answer to this one: what do you do when you notice a typo ten seconds after you committed? A new commit that says "typo fix", or squash the commit on to the previous commit?