[metaltyphoon]

Interesting take. If anyone care to actually learn how git works when rebasing, then it becomes much simpler. I always rebase and in 10 years of professional use, never once had a problem with it. That doesn’t mean other people don’t.

[canaus]

> If anyone care to actually learn how git works when rebasing, then it becomes much simpler.

That's a very arbitrarily vague answer. It's very easy to hand-wave the misuse of a tool just by saying "you don't know it well enough". It's much harder to admit that maybe the tool is just difficult to use in the first place.

[sreevisakh]

I have similar experience as the person you are answering to. Unlike them, I got into rebasing only recently. It isn't really a hand-wave of saying 'you don't know it well enough'. This paradox is caused by a quirk in git's design. Git uses a hybrid model for dealing with versions. It uses snapshots for storing them, as well as for operations like fetch, clone, etc. But that mental model causes a lot of confusion for operations like merges, pulls etc. Git uses the diff-patch model for those operations. Even weirder, much of git is actually designed to use the diff-patch model. The first time I ever got a grip on those operations was when I did rebasing. I found git much easier to understand when I could attribute each operation to the model git uses behind the scenes.

> It's much harder to admit that maybe the tool is just difficult to use in the first place.

That is unfortunately true. Git feels like a tool with several parts that were bolted on to solve problems its users (developers) faced. I didn't have that same difficulty with mercurial. I get this feeling that a pure patch based tool like pijul would match their workflow well and still be easy to learn.

[Nullabillity]

But you're still going to have a worse history than you would have by just letting git merge Do The Right Thing.

[dahart]

Naw, merge is orthogonal to cleaning up local history. Merging a mess is still a mess. Some people are fairly clean from the start, and some aren’t. And it depends on the task at hand, messes are easier to make when you’re doing more than one thing at a time.

[metaltyphoon]

Do you care to explain? How can you have a worst history when the `main` / `develop` branch have a linear history? I rather have a linear history where git bisect is trivial to use then a mess of merges and a hard to follow history.