The rebase option

As an alternative to merging, you can rebase the feature branch onto master branch using the following commands:

git checkout feature
git rebase master

This moves the entire feature branch to begin on the tip of the master branch, effectively incorporating all of the new commits in master. But, instead of using a merge commit, rebasing re-writes the project history by creating brand new commits for each commit in the original branch.

The major benefit of rebasing is that you get a much cleaner project history. First, it eliminates the unnecessary merge commits required by git merge. Second, as you can see in the above diagram, rebasing also results in a perfectly linear project history ‐ you can follow the tip of feature all the way to the beginning of the project without any forks. This makes it easier to navigate your project with commands like git log, git bisect, and gitk.

But, there are two trade-offs for this pristine commit history: safety and traceability. If you don't follow the golden rule of rebasing, re-writing project history can be potentially catastrophic for your collaboration workflow. And, less importantly, rebasing loses the context provided by a merge commit ‐ you can't see when upstream changes were incorporated into the feature.

Continue...