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Comment by rom1v | Hacker News Reader

Maintaining a fork by merging upstream into downstream branches would be a mess: upstream and downstream code would be totally entangled, there would no clean way to edit/remove/reorder downstream commits. You can't easily know what you actually changed (not the full diff, but each "atomic" clean change).

The way the author suggests is way cleaner IMO.

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> there would no clean way to edit/remove/reorder downstream commits

Yes, but I consider commits immutable so reordering or editing commits is not a thing that would happen. New commits are appended (either upstream or downstream), and any conflicting changes then of course have to be merged from upstream into downstream.

Merging seems easier? With merging you can get a definite answer about which commits are where. With rebase you’re dealing with changes/patches so the answer is less clear.

But it might be cleaner (for some definition of clean) to have a for which is just N commits on top of the upstream. Which is then rebased periodically.

It depends on whether the downstream only ever consumes upstream changes, or also often contributes changes to upstream. Rebasing in both directions can result in a messy history, too, especially if upstream isn't very careful in how it accepts pull requests.

Agreed, and in the wild I've indeed seen rebasing used significantly more often than merges for this purpose.

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