You seem to be making this very complex. But it really isn’t. Yes, git doesn’t track renames. So you are working around it by splitting your operation into 2 commits.

1. A pure rename.
2. A file change.

This way 1 is always considered a rename and 2 is just a regular file change with the same path. You may also consider tweaking the default rename detection threshold with flags like --find-renames or options like diff.renameLimit.

Would it be nice if Git tracked renames? Probably. But that isn’t how the data model works so it is unlikely to happen soon. But maybe they could add some metadata.

I think it doesn’t really make sense. Because you can’t “squash” one commit. squash is taking multiple commits and making them one.

When you do a “squash merge” you are really saying “squash all the commits that are on this branch and not the target” then merge.

So you can’t “squash a merge commit” you need at least one additional commit to squash in.

I feel like this is getting at something interesting and revealing but I am not convinced by what it says.

“There is no limit to the type of WhatsApp message that can be viewed by Meta,” the agent wrote in the email. He added that “Meta can and does view and store all the text messages, photographs, audio and video recordings” in an unencrypted format.

I highly doubt this is true. This is because there are third party clients such as https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp that send E2EE encrypted messages on WhatsApp. If literally all messages where available in an unencrypted format it would mean one of the following things.

• The E2EE protocol is broken and Meta knows the “crack”.
• That official client does a completely different protocol which uploads all messages in addition to doing the E2EE protocol.

Security are also reverse-engineering the official client. So if it was regularly doing this I would assume someone has noticed.

What I suspect is happening is that some features in the client (like Meta AI) are very easy to frequently activate and upload a large amount of messages when Facebook then archives. It would be quite likely that the average user is using these frequently. This could reasonably result in the vast majority of messages being available to Facebook.

But I think if the reports are exaggerated it doesn’t help sell the case.