• Okay honest question, when you merge a PR in GitHub and choose the squash commits box is that “rebasing”? Or is that just squashing? Because it seems that achieves the same thing you’re talking about.

    • There’s two options in the green button on a pr. One is squash and merge, the other is squash and rebase.

      Squashing makes one commit out of many. You should IMO always do this when putting your work on a shared branch

      Rebase takes your commit(s) and sticks them on the end.

      Merge does something else I don’t understand as well, and makes a merge commit.

      Also there was an earthquake in NYC when I was writing this. We may have angered the gods.

      • You should IMO always do this when putting your work on a shared branch

        No. You should never squash as a rule unless your entire team can’t be bothered to use git correctly and in that case it’s a workaround for that problem, not a generally good policy.

        Automatic squashes make it impossible to split commit into logical units of work. It reduces every feature branch into a single commit which is quite stupid.
        If you ever needed to look at a list of feature branch changes with one feature branch per line for some reason, the correct tool to use is a first-parent log. In a proper git history, that will show you all the merge commits on the main branch; one per feature branch; as if you had squashed.

        Rebase “merges” are similarly stupid: You lose the entire notion of what happened together as a unit of work; what was part of the same feature branch and what wasn’t. Merge commits denote the end of a feature branch and together with the merge base you can always determine what was committed as part of which feature branch.

        • I don’t want to see a dozen commits of “ran isort” “forgot to commit this file lol” quality.

          Do you?

          Having the finished feature bundled into one commit is nice. I wouldn’t call it stupid at all.

          • Note that I didn’t say that you should never squash commits. You should do that but with the intention of producing a clearer history, not as a general rule eliminating any possibly useful history.