To give you a concrete reason why you should care to preserve the exact history and why it’s a matter of trust: in your paper, you reported the pinned SHA head of the benchmarks you ran. When you destroy the history you make it hard for people to duplicate your benchmark results. Why report the SHA if you are going to destroy the history?

https://github.com/bendlang/bend/blob/80b6539bc57621633ca68e...