What is your opinion on the value and applicability of git-rebase?

[trevorbowen]

When should you use it, if ever?

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[crichID]

@trevorbowen great question! There are many, many opinions on this and most have some very valid arguments for and against using rebase as a strategy.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the visual representation of the history. If you use the standard recursive merge in git, your history will include a visual representation of the point where branches were merged together thanks to the merge commit git adds. However, if you use a rebase, you are always doing a fast-forward merge and your history will look like a single line of commits.

My one recommendation is this - if you are going to use rebase - use the rebase option on github.com. This will prevent some of the common issues that crop up when people rebase commits that have previously been pushed to the remote.