Why not rebase instead of merge?

[Geoffrey Mainland]

On 02/22/2013 05:05 PM, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> Somebody claiming to be Andy Georges wrote:
>> On 22 Feb 2013, at 17:50, Geoffrey Mainland <mainland at apeiron.net> wrote:
>>> I don't want to bike shed, but the prevalence of empty merge commits in
>>> the repo seems both undesirable and avoidable.
>>
>> I guess because rebasing means actually rewriting history. Which is
>> undesirable in itself. Once commits have been pushed out, you should
>> never rebase, afaik.
>
> git pull --rebase will only end up rebasing commits you have that
> aren't in the remote. So no public history changes unless you've
> pushed somewhere else already.

I am advocating rebasing before you push, so no public history is
rewritten. I am most definitely not advocating rebasing
previously-pushed work.

My personal opinion is that all non-public branched should be
rebased. However, I would be very happy just to avoid empty merge
commits.

Geoff