[gwking]

This may be outdated because git’s defaults have improved a lot over the years. When I first used git on a team was in 2011. As I recall, there were various commands like git log -p that would show nothing for a merge commit. So without extra knowledge of the git flags you would not find what you were looking for if it was in a side path of the merge history. This caused a lot of confusion at times. We switched to a rebase approach because linear history is easier for people to use.

To answer your question directly, if somewhat glibly, I’m glad I rebased every time I go looking for something in the history because I don’t have to think about the history as a graph. It’s easier.

More to your point, there are times when blame on a line does not show the culprit. If you move code, or do anything else to that line, then you have to keep searching. Sometimes it’s easier to look at the entire patch history of a file. If there is a way to repeatedly/recursively blame on a line, that’s cool and I’d love to know about it.

I now manage two junior engineers and I insist that they squash and rebase their work. I’ve seen what happens if they don’t. The merges get tangled and crazy, they include stuff from other branches they didn’t mean to, etc. the squash/rebase flow has been a way to make them responsible for what they put into the history, in a way that is simple enough that they got up to speed and own it.