[tunesmith]

I think the advice to rebase runs up against the business pattern of pushing your branch as soon as you create it (git-flow and a lot of jira/stash integrations work like this). Also some teams want to see evidence of your commits as you make them, which means pushing as you commit.

If you have a branch and it's already pushed, rebasing just feels kind of funny and can sometimes cause a lot of problems if anyone else has checked it out.

If you have a branch and it's local only, then merging from mainline into your branch and selecting rebase instead of merge is relatively painless.