Is this a fork of something? Or recently open sourced? Looks like there is a single commit where a majority of the code came from.
I do this all the time, right before open sourcing a project. Basically while it's private, commit quality can be a bit rough, and if I want to open source it, I'll remove .git, make a new init commit then open source it. No one needs to see what I do in my private abode :)
It's much better to refactor (rebase) the messy commits, removing the personal or embarrassing stuff; although that might result in a "false" history, a series of smaller-sized commits will usually be much easier to follow than reading a whole code base all at once.
Really, I see a ton of open-source projects that do this, and it results in a lot of more opacity and friction than necessary.
It results in less people being able to check the code and contribute to the project.
If the project is from the get-go supposed to be a long-lived project (like professional development for a business) then I agree, don't smoke the entire history no matter how embarrassing it is.
But for my personal projects, I can let you know that having access to the git history before I made it FOSS will make you dumber rather than being helpful for anything, compared to one clean starting commit.
I don't? I said I remove it because it isn't useful to anyone, might even be adding more confusion than it solves, not because I'm embarrassed over anything.
If there might be some usefulness hidden there (for example, trying something and then reverting it shows that you did explore it), it's also possible to place the old stuff in another repository or another branch (better the latter, unless it increases the repository's size too much)
True, those things tend to go into the documentation itself, checked into the codebase itself instead of being somewhat hidden inside the git history. Usually I end up having both a "Open Problems" (things yet to solve) and a "Tried X, this is why it didn't work" section somewhere in the documentation.
> it's also possible to place the old stuff in another repository
Yes, before the process I initially described, I usually leave a copy intact with the full-full history, but that's not what I published, just kept as an archive.
That's good, and yes, if that repository history really wouldn't add anything it's fine to squash everything
> > it's also possible to place the old stuff in another repository > > Yes, before the process I initially described, I usually leave a copy intact with the full-full history, but that's not what I published, just kept as an archive.
Ok, I meant a public repository though