4 ms·

We use rebase heavily and it makes our lives so much easier. The main rule is that we never rebase anything in the main repository- only in our forks. And every

We use rebase heavily and it makes our lives so much easier. The main rule is that we never rebase anything in the main repository- only in our forks. And everyone accepts that the forks are unstable.

lmm 7y ago
What do you actually get out of it though? Everyone talks about "clean history" but how much do you actually use that history? (except to bisect - and bisect works better without rebasing, IME) You're definitely missing out on being able to pull each other's branches - that's a huge help for avoiding conflicts ahead of time (if you know your colleague is halfway through a change in a given code area, start from their branch rather than master) or for unblocking development while a quickfix is making its way to master. I could believe that tradeoff could be worthwhile, but I've never found that rebasing offers any real advantages in practice.
- deleted 7y ago
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- phyzome 7y ago
  I use it all the time! I do really messy stuff locally, and then I rebase to organize it into commits that tell a story, which makes it easier for reviewers (and archaeologists, such as me in 5 months) to understand. Most common pattern: Commit 1 does a preliminary refactoring, commit 2 does the actual feature change. If you squash them together, the changes are harder to understand. But in the editing process, I often end up doing additional refactoring before I'm done with the feature work, so I use rebase -i to reorder and squash the changes appropriately. (I also run tests at both commits to make sure that my story is true, heh.) (This way, you can even do things like later revert the feature change without undoing the refactoring work.)
  - lmm 7y ago
    > I do really messy stuff locally, and then I rebase to organize it into commits that tell a story, which makes it easier for reviewers (and archaeologists, such as me in 5 months) to understand. So people review commit-by-commit? What review tool are you using for that? Github and Bitbucket very much nudge you towards reviewing the PR's diff as a whole, IME. And do you find that you actually look at the history in 5 months' time? People worry about this a lot but I find it's pretty rare to actually need more history than what's in the diffs. > But in the editing process, I often end up doing additional refactoring before I'm done with the feature work, so I use rebase -i to reorder and squash the changes appropriately. (I also run tests at both commits to make sure that my story is true, heh.) I do that but without the reordering - it just seems like a lot of overhead (and lots of potential for conflicts since the refactoring will almost necessarily be in the same code area as the feature work) plus running the build/tests again etc. > (This way, you can even do things like later revert the feature change without undoing the refactoring work.) You can do that either way, though I guess if all the refactoring commits were before the feature commits then that means fewer conflicts (though you still have to worry about subsequent refactorings in the same area). Is that something that happens often?
    - dharmab 7y ago
      > Github and Bitbucket very much nudge you towards reviewing the PR's diff as a whole, IME. That's if you're using the merge or squash options. There's an enforceable rebase option in GitHub which preserves the original commits. > And do you find that you actually look at the history in 5 months' time? I often go back 2-3 years to do archaeology on code written by people who are no longer in the org.
      - lmm 7y ago
        > That's if you're using the merge or squash options. There's an enforceable rebase option in GitHub which preserves the original commits. A rebase by definition doesn't preserve the original commits (whereas a merge does). But I'm talking about what the workflow for reviewing the PR looks like, before you approve it for merge (in any form) - that's the usual time for review, no?

lmm 7y ago

What do you actually get out of it though? Everyone talks about "clean history" but how much do you actually use that history? (except to bisect - and bisect works better without rebasing, IME) You're definitely missing out on being able to pull each other's branches - that's a huge help for avoiding conflicts ahead of time (if you know your colleague is halfway through a change in a given code area, start from their branch rather than master) or for unblocking development while a quickfix is making its way to master. I could believe that tradeoff could be worthwhile, but I've never found that rebasing offers any real advantages in practice.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
phyzome 7y ago
I use it all the time! I do really messy stuff locally, and then I rebase to organize it into commits that tell a story, which makes it easier for reviewers (and archaeologists, such as me in 5 months) to understand. Most common pattern: Commit 1 does a preliminary refactoring, commit 2 does the actual feature change. If you squash them together, the changes are harder to understand. But in the editing process, I often end up doing additional refactoring before I'm done with the feature work, so I use rebase -i to reorder and squash the changes appropriately. (I also run tests at both commits to make sure that my story is true, heh.) (This way, you can even do things like later revert the feature change without undoing the refactoring work.)
- lmm 7y ago
  > I do really messy stuff locally, and then I rebase to organize it into commits that tell a story, which makes it easier for reviewers (and archaeologists, such as me in 5 months) to understand. So people review commit-by-commit? What review tool are you using for that? Github and Bitbucket very much nudge you towards reviewing the PR's diff as a whole, IME. And do you find that you actually look at the history in 5 months' time? People worry about this a lot but I find it's pretty rare to actually need more history than what's in the diffs. > But in the editing process, I often end up doing additional refactoring before I'm done with the feature work, so I use rebase -i to reorder and squash the changes appropriately. (I also run tests at both commits to make sure that my story is true, heh.) I do that but without the reordering - it just seems like a lot of overhead (and lots of potential for conflicts since the refactoring will almost necessarily be in the same code area as the feature work) plus running the build/tests again etc. > (This way, you can even do things like later revert the feature change without undoing the refactoring work.) You can do that either way, though I guess if all the refactoring commits were before the feature commits then that means fewer conflicts (though you still have to worry about subsequent refactorings in the same area). Is that something that happens often?
  - dharmab 7y ago
    > Github and Bitbucket very much nudge you towards reviewing the PR's diff as a whole, IME. That's if you're using the merge or squash options. There's an enforceable rebase option in GitHub which preserves the original commits. > And do you find that you actually look at the history in 5 months' time? I often go back 2-3 years to do archaeology on code written by people who are no longer in the org.
    - lmm 7y ago
      > That's if you're using the merge or squash options. There's an enforceable rebase option in GitHub which preserves the original commits. A rebase by definition doesn't preserve the original commits (whereas a merge does). But I'm talking about what the workflow for reviewing the PR looks like, before you approve it for merge (in any form) - that's the usual time for review, no?