When you merge you still need to restart the CI. You're taking a shortcut if you have a head that passed CI, do a merge w/ no conflicts and push without redoin

When you merge you still need to restart the CI. You're taking a shortcut if you have a head that passed CI, do a merge w/ no conflicts and push without redoing the CI. EDIT: And you can totally take that same shortcut with rebase. Yes, with rebase you've lost the metadata about the previous head, but you can actually keep it by including a merge commit whose only purpose is to record the previous head of your branch (you can strip these out at push time, or keep them if you like, but they will essentially be useless -- at Sun we called merge commits "turds"). Merge-vs-rebase is totally orthogonal to CI/CD, but if you find that "merging means not restarting the CI" then you've already got a bias in favor of merging in your policies and tooling, and that's why you have that perception. I would challenge you to understand how your CI/CD is forcing a merge workflow rather than merely accepting it unquestioningly.