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I’ve found that people are either die hard rebase fans or die hard merge fans. Neither side can understand the other and I’ve never had it properly explained to me what the difference is or why I should care.



Rebase rewrites history to an extent. What I do (and this is also the advice in Pro Git for what thats worth) is use rebase when I'm working in local because its cleaner, but the moment anything ends up on GitHub, I use merge because I don't want to rewrite history that other people are aware of.

I am fine rewriting my own history on local because I know what I did, but not when its on GitHub because other people don't neccecarily know what I did.


I think this nails the difference in my workflow against people that tend to say it is difficult. In infrastructure commit history, which is often tied to CI CD processes that reach far outside of a repository and org - commit history is sacred. I need the absolute order of when things got merged in, because it provides a clean timeline to backtrack any issues. maybe I’m doing it wrong but every mature sysyem I’ve worked in basically operates this way. I suspect you run into more merge conflicts but I’m by no means a git expert.


The best I've found is the kernel development process: use both intelligently and give your branches a clean commit history before they're sent for review.

https://docs.kernel.org/maintainer/rebasing-and-merging.html


Merge = Smooshes two branches together into one. It keeps all the commits from both branches and creates a new "merge commit" to combine them. Doesn't mess with the commit history.

Rebase = Takes all the commits from one branch and sticks them on top of another branch, like stacking them in front. It rewrites the commit history to make everything look like one straight line.

I'm a rebase stan, but that's just my opinion.


One of the disadvantages of rebase is that it leads to a history where most of the commit have never existed in that exact form an any machine and so have never been built or run. This may interfere negatively with git bisect, which assumes that you can run and test the software at every commit. A squash and rebase workflow doesn't suffer from this problem, but then you end up with huge commits that may make it hard to pinpoint the exact change that causes a new misbehaviour.

Of course, having a merge based workflow doesn't guarantee that people only commit source that runs, so bisect might be broken anyway, and you get a messy history on top of that, unlike the beautiful clean line of a rebase based workflow, that makes it look like the system was developed by people of superhuman mental clarity.


Wait. If `git bisect` is anyway identifying merge commits only (since those are the only on history), how are you supposed to get advantage of the supposedly superior smaller commits?


`git bisect` hits every commit, not only merge commits. They're saying if you used squash-merge (which is a special kind of rebase), the small commits don't exist anymore so there's no way for bisect to find the small commit that caused the problem. Regular merges and non-squashing rebases both keep the small commits so bisect will find them.


Counterpoint: I do both.

There are situations that make one or the other clearly preferred within a repo, besides per-repo/org-consistency for more widely shared work. After a few years excavating in a merge-only-salt-mine as well as working orgs where merge commits are banned you get a feeling for what's helpful when (esp considering auditability and history legibility).

Always rebase incoming feature branch on the base branch before merging into a shared repo regardless of approach, though - "merged from main" inside a merge commit on main makes anything an inscrutable tangly mess very quickly.


`git merge` is for regular people who are measured by how much they can accomplish in a given timeframe.

`git rebase` is for academics and startups where no one gives a fuck about anything and no one bats an eye if you waste a day or two on a rebase gone wrong.

It's easy to undo a merge and a bit nasty if you already pushed the merge commit. But undoing a rebase? Oh god you're in for a lot of pain.


> But undoing a rebase? Oh god you're in for a lot of pain.

It's actually pretty easy. You either make a checkpoint tag before you start the rebase, and reset to it if you notice something went wrong; or, if you forgot to make the checkpoint, check the reflog and find the commit you started from, and reset to that.

Reflog has a flag which adds timestamps to every entry, which I find is helpful for this:

    git reflog --date=iso


This doesn't match my experience and it is almost exactly opposite of my personal preference of rebased commits. I get that you want to be incendiary but I think this misses the point, perhaps on purpose.

My good faith addition here: a major influence in this debate seems to me to be how a team views their repo. Merge heavy stuff makes great sense for a repo whose job is just to hold everything; essentially a big and powerful shared clipboard that has all the myriad work-in-progress. Almost like a "dumb" tool (and trust me when I say dumb with lots of love and respect - it isn't criticism it is about which direction coupling points). On the other hand, the rebase heavy approach makes more sense if you view the repo as a contextual knowledge store, holding an almost idealized version of the point in time, uncluttered by the reality of the path actually taken. To broadly generalize my experience, I've found the merge version is generally faster, has low overhead in the moment, and scales pretty well since it is nearly the lowest common denominator approach. Conversely, I've found the rebase version makes debugging and context switching faster and enables a leaner team to cover more ground because the repo has some context and documentation built in via its organization.

Of course, doing either approach poorly will have negative consequences and being inconsistent in either approach is worse than consistently doing one or the other.

I'm not trying to make an argument for which to choose but I am pushing back hard on rebase only being used by teams who are unprofessional and don't care about wasting their time.


the old commits are still in your reflog, and if they belong to a branch that isn't only on your machine, you can nag a coworker if you don't know how to use that


yeah, totally agree, it's so hard to type `git rebase --abort` (?)


Get out of here with your academic mumbo-jumbo


I think a lot of the people who use merge do so because that’s what they learned initially.

Anecdotally, a lot of my coworkers who use merge are conceptually trying to stack their commits on top of previous ones. My lukewarm take: most of the time, rebase is actually the intended operation and merge is used as a hammer.


People who are these fans don't really use git. They use github subset of git. Hence, all these problems. In my experience, people who actually use git instead of github don't have these issues.




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