this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Unless commits are signed, you can always rewrite history. No matter the tool. Extreme example demonstrating that this is possible is the fact that I can change my machine’s time, change my user name and reply the tool’s commands to construct whatever history I want.
If you have access to the actual files themselves you can even edit them with a text, binary, or hex editor depending on the format.
Unless you go in with a byte editor, you can't change Mercurial's commit history. I didn't say "fabricate", I said "change".
You can, as you say, configure your user name and email to be "Linus Torvalds" and change your computer date and fabricate whatever history you want. You might also be able to go in with a byte editor and fiddle bits and change history that way; Mercurial provides no blockchain-like cryptographic guarantees. But, unlike git, rewriting history is not supported by Mercurial; history is immutable. Rebase doesn't change history; the commit index only ever increments. Squash and rebasing create new commits, and there history of what happened is always in the repo.
There's a distinct and clear difference between Mercurial's immutable history and git's de jour history rewriting, which can literally - with the git command - change published history to make a commit made 3 years ago look like it was committed by someone else. The git workflow used by the kernel team, and the b4 tool, use this history rewriting in the standard workflow.
If you wanted to do the same thing with Mercurial, you'd have to get a byte editor and start hacking the on-disk format, and it would have to be entirely outside of any Mercurial tooling. And there is some sequential hash verification you'd have to work around, even if it's not cryptographically auditable.
The point is, with Mercurial it would be hard and the result would be utterly incompatible with any other clone of the repo: there would be no way to propagate your changes to other clones. With git, this is a standard workflow.
In git you also cannot change history of a commit. You can only create a new commit with a new history. You’re arguing about semantics which don’t change the end result.
As the example under discussion demonstrates, it’s also impossible to propagate the changes to git clones. Since history changed, merging the pull requests shows all the differences. That’s how Linus noticed the issue.
Did you read the same thread I did?
Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.
https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html
Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite
So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.
You can not change history for any published changes - like I said, doing so makes your repository incompatible with any other clone.
That's the same on Git.
It is not standard workflow in git to change the commit history for a branch on the remote. You have to use
--force, and the next time someone pulls they also have to--forcetheir any local tracking branch to follow the remote. Every git guide on the internet warns against pushing a rebase for this reason.Locally you can do whatever. I'm not familiar with Mercurial, but I assume it must work the same as git: I can do whatever I want locally, and only what I push matters. And when I'm doing stupid stuff locally as I organize my changes, rebase is handy.
Read the thread. The Kernel maintainers use b4, which rewrites history.
Mercurial does not work like git, and history is immutable: there are no commands for changing history.
Yes, it rewrote history, and thanks to Git's robustness it was extremely easy to notice and identify. Forced rewrites are not an issue if you trust people on your repo, and if you don't (and honestly you shouldn't, everyone fucks up), you can disable force rewrites in the remote
I'm responding to the literal words you said that were inaccurate. Cheers.