Pull with rebase essentially takes all of your local commits and applies each one in turn to the remote head as if each one was a patch. Plain "git pull" doesn

Pull with rebase essentially takes all of your local commits and applies each one in turn to the remote head as if each one was a patch. Plain "git pull" doesn't do anything wrong at all, rebase is just a different style. It lets you deal with conflicts one by one, in the context of the original commit. I actually disagree with Yehuda on this one. I like pull-with-rebase in the case where there are no conflicts, but if there are conflicts, I'd rather have a record of the original work, plus a special commit that shows the work done to reconcile in the case of a conflict. But that's really a matter of taste.