Integrating an approved feature
After a feature has been approved by your team, you have the option of rebasing the
feature onto the tip of the master branch before using git merge to integrate the
feature into the main code base.
This is a similar situation to incorporating upstream changes into a feature branch,
but since you're not allowed to re-write commits in the master branch, you have to
eventually use git merge to integrate the feature. However, by performing a rebase
before the merge, you're assured that the merge will be fast-forwarded, resulting in
a perfectly linear history. This also gives you the chance to squash any follow-up
commits added during a pull request.
If you're not entirely comfortable with git rebase, you can always perform the rebase
in a temporary branch. That way, if you accidentally mess up your feature's history, you
can check out the original branch and try again. For example:
git checkout feature
git checkout -b temporary-branch
git rebase -i master
# [Clean up the history]
git checkout master
git merge temporary-branch