[luckydude]

I'm the guy who started this DAG model (also at Sun with NSElite and then later with BitKeeper).

I agree that rebase == centralized. It's a math thing. If you rebase and someone has a clone of your work prior to the rebase chaos happens when they come together. So you have to enforce a centralized flow to make it work in all cases. It's pretty much provable as in a math proof.

[cryptonector]

Not true! At Sun we did this with project gates regularly. The way it works (as I've described several times in this thread now) is that you rebase --onto. That is, you use a tag for the pre-rebase project upstream to find the merge base for your branch, then cherry-pick your commits (i.e., all local commits after the merge base) onto the post-rebase project upstream.

Now, you don't want to do this with the ultimate upstream, though occasionally it happened at Sun with the OS/Net gate, usually due to some toxic commit that was best eliminated from the history rather than reverted, or through some accident.

But you'd be right to say that the Sun model was centralized in that there was just one ultimate upstream. (There was one per-"consolidation", since Solaris was broken up into multiple parts like that, but whatever, the point stands.)

Whereas with Linux, say, one might have multiple kernel gates kept by different gatekeepers. Still, if you're contributing to more than one of them, it's easier to cherry-pick (rebase!) your commits onto each upstream than to just merge your way around -- IMO. I.e., you can have a Linux kernel like decentralized dev model and still rebase.

However, I as you can see from my comment in the previous paragraph, _rebase_ itself does not imply a centralized model.

[luckydude]

I get that you can work around the problems, you don't seem to get that from a math point of view, rebase forces either

a) a centralized model

or

b) you have to throw away any work based on the dag before the rebase

or)

c) you have the history in the graph twice (which causes no end of problems).

(a) is the math way, (b) and (c) are ad-hoc hacks. You are well into the ad-hoc hacks, you've found a way to make it work but it includes "don't do that" warnings to users. My experience is that you don't want to have work flows that include "don't do that". Users will do that.