Utter Disregard for Git Commit History https://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/ (the unit of change is important -- put PR descriptions in merge commits?)
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I really like the MELPA model of packaging directly from git. It solves the problem of forgetting to release something -- just merge a PR and you're done.
It also makes version number bumps much less important.
You could go even further in a statically typed language and also figure out when breaking changes occur.
I'm increasingly doubtful that commit messages should be entirely immutable.
I sometimes find myself editing or commenting on merged pull requests, to help future readers.
Phabricator appended a URL to commit messages, which helped. In principle PR merging could do the same thing.
It's weird that GitHub shows time since the last commit, but not time since the first commit. It's a nice way of seeing how mature a project is.