[OJFord]

My preferred is rebase (exactly as you describe) but keeping the original fork point, (unless it becomes necessary to depend on some other later work from another branch, the original base or not) and then merge.

So you end up with a cleaned-up branch history via rebase, and a master branch that's similarly clean, with a higher level view of 'logical commits' that 'merge X feature', 'merge Y bug fix'.

[pastage]

With rebase I keep my commits small, easier to merge then. I've seen strange things slip through large commits. E.g. Someone (me) missed the deleted files, rebased and hence recreated them.

Then I tried to squash them before merging. But if you squash your commits you get a large commit and you get the same problem. Oh well...

I guess it's easier when you have small features.