[Mithaldu]

People who love rebasing and linear history tend to see feature branches, even if pushed to a public repository, as private to their creator and maintainer and fair game for any sort of rebase. In fact, we do consider rebasing of feature branches mandatory.

[jrochkind1]

The counter argument though is when your feature branch doesn't only have _one_ creator/maintainer. Mine often don't, especially on open source projects, two or three people can be working collaboratively, or others that aren't the lead on the feature can come in to make a helpful commit here or there.

And when one person rebases the feature branch it wreaks havoc for collaborators on the feature branch.

Which is why I limit my "rebasing is okay" on a feature branch to only _right before_ it's merged into master and then deleted. It still doesn't get rid of all the problems, but it gets rid of most of them.

[Mithaldu]

If you have a handful of people, you simply communicate with them, check that there's a good reason to rebase and that you're not creating unnecessary burden and do it when everyone is happy.

When you have more than a handful of people, then your feature branch is not a feature branch, but a project, which should have feature branches of its own.

Scale, dynamic adaption to it and situational awareness are a requirement in team work. :)

[kazinator]

Bingo! Recently I've been working on resolving a bug with a small group of coworkers. We created a repo in which we have been rewriting public branches all the time. You just send an e-mail. Everyone just has to know how to migrate their local changes.

   $ git fetch # the rewritten world
   $ git checkout
   Your branch and 'origin/foobar' have diverged,
   and have 13 and 17 different commits each, respectively.
   (use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours)

Now I happen to know that only 3 out of the 13 divergent commits on foobar are my local commits. I rebase my local foobar branch to the upstream one, migrating just those 3, and ditching the remaining ten:

   $ git rebase HEAD~3 origin/foobar

Easy.

This is all just test code people are trying in investigating the bug. Any permanent fixes arising are properly cleaned up, commented, and submitted via Gerrit to a whole other repo where they are cleanly cherry picked to a linear trunk which is never rewritten.

[jrochkind1]

> If you have a handful of people, you simply communicate with them, check that there's a good reason to rebase and that you're not creating unnecessary burden and do it when everyone is happy.

Why is that communications overhead worth it, vs simply not rebasing? (or at least not until right before you merge into master and delete the release branch)

I think the communications overhead can be significant, especially if the handful (even just 2 or 3) collaborators are at different locations, organizations, timezones, etc.

I'd rather just not have to think about it, not to have to deal with that communications overhead, and not rebase. What do you get from interim rebasing, anyway, especially if you are still wiling to do a final rebase before merge?

[Mithaldu]

> Why is that communications overhead worth it

Because it pays dividends in the long run.

If a project looks like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10190786/Screenshot%2020...

Then hunting bugs becomes very difficult, because you can't simply see behavior change from one commit, it might change in any merge because the behavior of one commit in one branch disagrees with the behavior of another commit in a different branch. Even worse, the behavior might be created from a badly-done conflict resolution in the merge commit, which is REALLY hard to see.

I envy you if you have not yet experienced this pain, but i assure you it is a real problem; and that you're merely exchanging effort now with effort later.

[sytse]

If it is pushed other people can cherry-pick, CI generates results and other people might push commits on the same branch (when using the same repo). We think pushing indicates you want to work in public. We even made a Work In Progress (WIP) function for it in GitLab http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/wip_merge_requests.html

[Mithaldu]

It's a social question. To be honest, for the vast majority of people i work with (and i've worked with a few: https://github.com/wchristian?tab=repositories ) it would be considered very strange to see feature branches as public and stone-written history. There's a common understanding that feature branches are feature branches because the creator wishes to avoid writing things in stone.

That said, if a team decides on that kind of convention, marking things as WIP is a neat feature. I've seen other people do that simply by creating feature branches as "<username>/feature_branch".