I share an svn codebase with a few dozen developers, and while we don't have rebase, the history remains readable. There's a few guidelines that enable this: (1) all work must happen in the context of a jira issue or story, (2) the commit message starts with the jira issue id and its description, and only after that any stream of consciousness remarks, and (3) syntax errors will cause the commit to bounce and failing tests from the CI build will get you frowned upon. The history will usually reveal a few commits for a feature, spread half a day or a day apart. We rely on the local history feature of phpstorm to be able to backtrack to an earlier version (that and good old copy-pasting of the working copy before you start an experiment)