Hacker News Reader

Hm, you're right. The simplest example I could think of right now is the upstream having renamed/deleted something that the dev branch depends on, but didn't directly touch. That would definitely cause a "broken" history during the rebased commits, and is technically unavoidable.

View on HN

A surprisingly common occurrence is two developers independently notice and fix the same problem, but they implement the fix in two different ways. The diffs might not conflict at all during a rebase. Or they might only conflict in some places, and the “behavioral conflict” remains after the diff conflict is resolved. This issue would eventually be noticed and fixed when tests fail before merging to master, but the intermediate rewritten commits are unlikely to be fixed.

I can see this happening, but with a reasonable bug-tracking solution in place and enforcing `fix/...` branches for fixes, these situations could mostly be avoided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com