Merging is for keeping track of a group of commits that has been taken from a feature branch and included in the mainline. Why would you clutter the feature branch with periodic main merges when you can cleanly rebase it and keep it tidy?
Merging is for bringing a group of commits from branch A into branch B. It is, quite literally, the original way to perform this operation. It's not "clutter", it's a correct picture of how the code was developed.
Ist it really? If you would See my uncleaned history, it would take you days to understand what I was even trying to do.
Your statement seems based on the assumption that someone knows how to achieve a particular thing right from the start. But that isn't always the case and there might be a lot of different approaches until the correct or best one is found.
Do you really want to review dead code that's somewhere in the commits of a feature branch?
Oh, and here I though this discussion was about git. But you're talking GitHub.
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/380/30121
(Is this pedantic? I guess in a lot of contexts. But you talked about the original, intended way to do it. So it seems on-topic here.)
In git syntax, the command is "git request-pull".
What's that in natural language? Perhaps... "A pull request"?
What kind of email is that?
A user (who wasn't you) called me out for talking about GitHub instead of git, and I said it was perfectly fair because the original discussion was specifically about sending pull requests, which is a term we only talk about in 2024 because GitHub made it a thing. Therefore, it's entirely fair to discuss it in the context of GitHub and not git.
Now we are five posts down into this bizarre tangent and I am unsure what point, if any, you are trying to raise here. That people now use the term pull requests when not using GitHub? I don't think I've seen it anywhere except for hosted services, but my experience is not universal.
Based on?
Considering the email workflow of the kernel I can’t really make sense of “intended way to do it”. For individual commits people send out patches. I’ve never seen an email thread where some merge topology is recorded: it’s just a list of patches. A straight line.
I’m pretty sure that people used patch queues before Git (and even now with quilt). Restacking a bunch of commits on top of the mainline is the same operation as a rebase.
I’ve certainly seen Linus get mad at another maintainer for allowing a back-merge into his history (merge main back into feature branch).