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.
dukk@programming.dev 10 months ago
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 often 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.
GigglyBobble@kbin.social 10 months ago
You are aware you're talking about two different pieces of software?
dukk@programming.dev 10 months ago
Yeah, I am. However GitHub, being the biggest Git hosting provider and all that, makes you use merge commits. FF-merges must be done manually from the command line. While this definitely isn’t a problem for me, many people out there just don’t care and merge without a second thought (which, as I said in my comment, results in having to create a new branch and cherry picking the commits onto there).
themusicman@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You should check out the repo options on GitHub. It most definitely supports rebase merges, and you can disable other merge types if desired.
GandarfDeGrape@midwest.social 10 months ago
Sounds like I just gotta get better with rebasing. But generally I do my merges clean from local changes. I’ll commit and push, then merge in, push. Then keep working. Not too hard to track but I’ve found it’s the diff at MR time that people really pay attention to. So individual commits haven’t been too crucial.