I noticed that somehow two commits on the same branch ended up with the same note attached. I believe that this is the result of me using interactive rebase's 'edit' instruction to insert new commits, and then it copied the note from the edited commit to the commit from from where I 'git rebase --continue'-ed. Here's a simple illustration: $ git log --oneline --notes 70be36f (HEAD -> master) third 02b5ef9 second Notes: A note on the second commit f93427a first $ git config --get notes.rewriteref refs/notes/commits $ git rebase -i HEAD^^ ## Change the instruction sheet to 'edit' the "second" commit ## Stopped at 02b5ef9... second You can amend the commit now, with git commit --amend Once you are satisfied with your changes, run git rebase --continue $ git commit --allow-empty -m "Insert new commit #1" [detached HEAD 2d05076] Insert new commit #1 $ git commit --allow-empty -m "Insert new commit #2" [detached HEAD 0ed24dc] Insert new commit #2 $ git rebase --continue Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master. $ git log --oneline --notes b02a593 (HEAD -> master) third 0ed24dc Insert new commit #2 Notes: A note on the second commit 2d05076 Insert new commit #1 02b5ef9 second Notes: A note on the second commit f93427a first Notice how the note now appears twice, because it has been copied from the (unmodified) "second" commit to the last commit that has been inserted on top before continuing. I certainly didn't expect this, and can't readily see a use case where it's desirable, but maybe I just lack imagination :) However, once rebase stops for the 'edit' instruction the user can do just about anything, so I'm not sure how rebase could figure out when to copy the note and when not. This is not a regression of following the rewrite in C, the scripted version had the same behavior (I think v1.8.0 was the oldest I tried). This doesn't happen when inserting a 'break' instruction between picking the "second" and "third" commits, and then adding new commits. Alas, the 'break' instruction is not even a year old, and I have been using 'edit' for this purpose for over a decade now... so re-training my fingers will be hard :)