>I had always understood rebase as a mechanism that replaces merging a feature branch onto master, that allows you to squash all the 'messy' development commits

>I had always understood rebase as a mechanism that replaces merging a feature branch onto master, that allows you to squash all the 'messy' development commits on the feature branch, onto a single nice clean commit on master. For squashing into a single commit, you can even use git merge branch_name --squash But, yeah, rebasing is a nice and more general way to do it.