There's this terrible misunderstanding that "git rebase means rewriting history, which is bad" when in fact rewriting history locally (before you push upstream) is fine and quite desirable.
[0] In fact you can rewrite history upstream if you really must, but then you have to securely communicate to downstream users how to recover by telling them the previous HEAD commit and the new one so they can use git rebase --onto. If you really wanted to, you could make a habit out of this and make it work just fine. Most projects just aren't set up for this.
You're definitely missing out on being able to pull each other's branches - that's a huge help for avoiding conflicts ahead of time (if you know your colleague is halfway through a change in a given code area, start from their branch rather than master) or for unblocking development while a quickfix is making its way to master. I could believe that tradeoff could be worthwhile, but I've never found that rebasing offers any real advantages in practice.
Most common pattern: Commit 1 does a preliminary refactoring, commit 2 does the actual feature change.
If you squash them together, the changes are harder to understand. But in the editing process, I often end up doing additional refactoring before I'm done with the feature work, so I use rebase -i to reorder and squash the changes appropriately. (I also run tests at both commits to make sure that my story is true, heh.)
(This way, you can even do things like later revert the feature change without undoing the refactoring work.)
So people review commit-by-commit? What review tool are you using for that? Github and Bitbucket very much nudge you towards reviewing the PR's diff as a whole, IME.
And do you find that you actually look at the history in 5 months' time? People worry about this a lot but I find it's pretty rare to actually need more history than what's in the diffs.
> But in the editing process, I often end up doing additional refactoring before I'm done with the feature work, so I use rebase -i to reorder and squash the changes appropriately. (I also run tests at both commits to make sure that my story is true, heh.)
I do that but without the reordering - it just seems like a lot of overhead (and lots of potential for conflicts since the refactoring will almost necessarily be in the same code area as the feature work) plus running the build/tests again etc.
> (This way, you can even do things like later revert the feature change without undoing the refactoring work.)
You can do that either way, though I guess if all the refactoring commits were before the feature commits then that means fewer conflicts (though you still have to worry about subsequent refactorings in the same area). Is that something that happens often?
That's if you're using the merge or squash options. There's an enforceable rebase option in GitHub which preserves the original commits.
> And do you find that you actually look at the history in 5 months' time?
I often go back 2-3 years to do archaeology on code written by people who are no longer in the org.
A rebase by definition doesn't preserve the original commits (whereas a merge does). But I'm talking about what the workflow for reviewing the PR looks like, before you approve it for merge (in any form) - that's the usual time for review, no?