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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

It's not fun if you rebase, and realize that every single one of your many commits need to hand-merged.

But you need to deal with those conflicts before merging anyway? And they're a lot easier to deal with in the context of the individual commits than when dealing with one big merge commit, I find.

The issue is that when you rebase, each commit in the chain gets re-applied, one by one. If you change something in an earlier commit that affects later commits, you could end up having to fix the same or similar conflicts several times before the rebase finishes (even with git's conflict resolution cache).

In contrast, if you instead merge, you only have to resolve conflicts once, for the merge commit.

That being said, I tend to be very fastidious about cleaning up my history before pushing, even if it means tedious, repetitive conflict resolution. But I do understand that other people might not think it's worth the trouble.

I think that can be resolved by rebasing onto the first commit of your branch to first make sure all the commits are minimal, and only then to rebase onto your main branch.

That said, I must say that I've personally experienced as a pain, so I don't actually do that.

Agreed, I used to interactively rebase but have since switched to a four step process. If you have conflicts, you'll deal with them all at once when you merge in `origin/master`.

  git fetch

  git merge origin/master

  git reset origin/master

  git commit

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