Re: Rebasing vs. merging

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 8/19/20 7:51 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> If you have time and motivation, please read the thread starting at
> 
>    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-12/msg01444.html

I wasn't involved in that thread (though perhaps I should have been, as one of 
its topics was a botched rebase+merge that lost of one of my commits :-), so I 
just now read it. A few remarks:

* The botched rebase+merge there was due to our old practice of putting 
ChangeLog patches into each commit. We've stopped doing that (thank goodness), 
so that particular botch wouldn't happen under our current development practice. 
Of course similar problems could still occur in other files, though they're less 
likely.

* The thread's key bit of advice was David Engster's "Never rebase commits that 
are upstream." 
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-12/msg01468.html> This is 
indeed good advice. The git-rebase man page has more details on this for those 
interested.

* Rebasing local commits works just fine with a merge-based workflow, and I do 
it all the time in Emacs development. It's OK even if you have local branches 
and merges, so long as you consistently follow David's advice.

* That being said, I don't use local merges, as a primary role of merges is to 
support collaboration and I collaborate very poorly with myself (because I 
always get into arguments :-).