History repeats itself

Merge commits suck.

My biggest issue with GitHub is that it always squashes and merges. It’s really annoying as it not only takes away from commit history, but it also puts the fork out of sync with the main branch, and I’ll often realize this after having implemented another features, forcing me end up cherry picking just to fix it. Luckily LazyGit makes this process pretty painless, but still.

Seriously people, use FF-merge where you can.

Then again, if my feature branch has simply gone behind upstream, I usually pull and rebase. If you’ve got good commits, it’s a really simple process and saves me a lot of future headaches.

There’s obviously places not to use rebase(like when multiple people are working on a branch), but I consider it good practice to always rebase before merge. This way, we can always just FF-merge and avoid screwing with the Git history. We do this at my company and honestly, as long as you follow good practices, it should never really get too out of hand.

Always merge when you're not sure. Rebasing rewrites your commit history, and merging with the squash flag discards history. In either case, you will not have a real log of what happened during development.

Why do you want that? Because it allows you to go back in time and search. For example, you could be looking for the exact commit that created a specific issue using git bisect. Rebasing all the commits in a feature branch makes it impossible to be sure they will even work, since they represent snapshots that never existed.

I'll never understand why people suggest you should default to rebasing. When prompted about why, it's usually some story about how it went wrong and it was just easier to do it the wrong way.

I'm not saying never squash or rebase. It depends on the situation but if you had to pick a default, it should be to simply merge.

What you do is create a third branch off master, cherry pick the commits from the feature branch, and merge in the third branch. So much easier.

I've always merged. Rebase simplifies the history graph, but realistically I can't think of a time where that has been important to me, or any of the teams I've worked with.

Maybe on some projects with a huge number of concurrent branches it becomes more important, probably less so for smaller teams.

It only matters if you want to be able to use the commit tree and actually find something. Otherwise, there's no harm in using merges.

I try to structure my commits in a way that minimizes their blast radius, which usually likes trying to reduce the number of files In touch per commit.

For example, my commit history would look like this:

• Add new method to service class
• Use new service class method in worker

And then as I continue working, all changes will be git commit --fixuped to one of those two commit's hashes depending on where they occur.

And when it's time to rebase in full, I can do a git rebase master --interactive --autosquash.

Rebase. Merge into current leaves merge commits in the dev branches.

If the changes are small enough I just do rebase -Xtheirs main, and look to see if anything looks fucky (git diff main..).

I create a new branch locally with git switch --create, pull everything from main, sacrifice a small squirrel, and run the project to make sure everything still works.

If something doesn't work or I can't figure out how to resolve conflicts, I quietly switch back to my previous branch like nothing happened. That problem is for future me.

About 20 developers on one repo in my case, we use a rebase merge strategy with fairly small feature branches so I think that helps keep merge conflicts down. Another thing is our codebase is LARGE, so changes don't often conflict.