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by legomaster 4171 days ago
Talking to a lot of people at conferences and similar events, rebasing against the target branch before merging is pretty uncommon. Few people think a clean history is that important.

Personally I think, rebase + auto-squash/auto-fixit makes the history a lot easier when it's time to look back. It just happens so rarely I wonder if it's really worth the effort I expend on it.
2 comments
btilly 4170 days ago
YMMV. I've seen people all over the map on this.

I have noticed that among people I respect, there is a strong correlation between using git-bisect and wanting a clean history.

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serve_yay 4171 days ago
I don't know what it is, but when I try to rebase master into the feature branch, my PR diff ends up littered with commits that aren't part of the PR. Then my reviewers have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant crap to see my changes. I thought the whole point of rebasing was so that wouldn't happen.

Anyway, now I just don't do it anymore. Git is a pain in the ass.

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taeric 4170 days ago
If you rebased master into the feature branch, then what you said makes sense. I realize it may look like semantics, but you rebase your feature branch onto the master branch. This means something completely different.

I am curious what you use as an alternative.

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serve_yay 4170 days ago
Huh. If I rebase master into the feature branch, isn't that supposed to move the point at which the feature branched off of master from where it was, to the HEAD of master?

About rebasing the feature branch onto master, my team doesn't do that, we squash the feature branch commits into one commit when merging to master.

(I don't use anything besides git, but that doesn't mean I can't hate it)

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taeric 4170 days ago
No, if you rebase master into the feature branch, that will move all of the new commits to master into the feature branch.

Now, it could be that I am just being a stickler for phrasing here. So, to clarify, if you are on the branch and run 'git rebase master', that is not rebasing master into the feature branch. That is rebasing the feature branch onto master.

So, is that what you were doing?

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serve_yay 4170 days ago
My phraseology was wrong, apologies. Yes that is what I was doing. You can probably tell that my default attitude towards git is one of confusion and frustration, this is no different
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taeric 4170 days ago
No worries. I can not claim that it is a simple problem to just immediately understand. Worse, I am not good enough in my understanding, to explain in a message forum. :(

I can say that it is easy, once you understand it more. It will take some time.

Countering that point, though; if you have a codebase that is rapidly changing at all times... there really isn't anything git can do to help.

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