Appropriate use of version control

Version control serves several purposes. Most of them rely upon having a clean history. Firstly, having clear and appropriate commit messages helps to find changes in the history when you need to find when a particular change was made. Secondly, having discrete changes in each commit makes it easier to revert selected changes, as well as to review changes in isolation.

The existing approach may work for the maintainer, and that's fair enough. It's his project. But, it does greatly reduce the utility of the project history both for himself and for anyone else who wants to work upon it. There are existing good practices for using version control, and this approach violates many of them.