| > It always feels to me like people just being image-conscious. Every author is "image-conscious" because they want to present their thoughts clearly to the world. That's where your rather substantial misconceptions about the application and utility of rebasing come from. This isn't about rewriting published history, which is rightly and nearly universally considered A Bad Idea(tm) in the git world. The recommendations around rebasing are essentially identical to authors editing their text before publication. Note "before". Before {an article, some code} is published, edit, rewrite, cleanup all you want. After it's published, an explicit annotation is the best practice. For an author, perhaps an "Updated" note in an article or a printing number in a book. For a developer, add a new commit recording the change. For my part, I use rebasing extensively and lightly before I publish code. By "extensively" I mean, I just don't hesitate to edit for clarity. This is the same as I'd do in authoring a post or email. By "lightly", I mean that I don't waste time doing radical history surgery but I regularly do things like squash a commit into an earlier logical parent commit. E.g. I started a refactor, then a little while later found some more instances of the same change. Often, this is just amending the HEAD commit, but occasionally I need to go back a short ways on my working branch. This also fluidly extends to use of git's index and the stash for separating out logical commits from what's in the working copy. A typical example: 1. git add <files for a logical change> 2. git stash -k # put everything not added into the stash 3. # run tests 4. git commit 5. git stash pop Once you're used to the above workflow, an understanding of git's commit amending and rebasing tools extends this authoring capability into recent history. This is wonderful because it takes pressure off of committing, meaning that git history becomes a powerful first-class, editable history/undo stack. |