[bendavis381]

Check out how phabricator handles this. It's essentially what you're asking for: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_rev...

TL;DR: PRs are not based off a diff between master and a remote branch. Instead, phabricator sends up patches to code review and when approved, the Phabricator tooling handles the rebase locally. No remote branches and clean history.

[Pxtl]

That's an interesting fix although I'm unsure about the sense in discouraging pushing changes.

It seems like the chief benefit they tout - clean history - is already handled by the auto-squash-and-delete approach. The real problem is the difficulty in cleanup of secondary or undeleted branches.

It isnt' really what I was asking for, though. What I want is a "soft-squash" where the intermediate commits aren't deleted, rather they're just hidden from history. The ability to draw a dotted line around a region of the DAG and say "treat this blob like it was one commit for all intents and purposes unless I say otherwise.