I am in the midst of doing some non-standard, probably doomed, experiments on a git repository. The goal is to create a remote repository with a truncated history which can still share commits with an internal repository which has a full history.

I've had some success using a graft to connect the public history with the private history - when I push from my internal repository, only the post-graft contents are included.

So my main question is: what is the simplest way of taking a commit, eliminating its parent and writing a graft in place of the parent?

A more general question: is what I'm trying to do going to cause me pain in the long run, do you know if there's a better way?