GIT REBASE FAST FORWARD CODE

A top-notch history adds significant value to the whole team’s work, be it contributors coming in for the first time or getting back after a while away, project leads, code reviewers, etc. I shall try to not only highlight their respective roles, but also equip you with a few reflexes and best practices so you can always produce a public history that is both expressive (concise yet clear) and semantic (viewing the history graph reflects the team’s goals in an obvious way). They have entirely separate purposes and, indeed, are not supposed to be used for the same reasons at all. These two commands actually have hardly anything in common. I often see people put merge and rebase in the same basket, under the fallacy that both result in “getting commits from the branch across in our own branch” (which is, by the way, incorrect). git cherry-pick (which is functionally inseparable from rebase).git rebase, especially git rebase -i and git rebase -p.

In order to achieve this, they rely on four main tools: One of the most important skills of a Git user lies in their ability to maintain a clean, semantic public history of commits. Such a clean graph has significant added value.Īll other use cases are better off using rebase in its various incarnations: classical, three-point, interactive or cherry-picking. That's why from now on, I'm going to be doing lots of merging but without fast forwarding.Cette page est également disponible en français.Ī git merge should only be used for incorporating the entire feature set of branch into another one, in order to preserve a useful, semantically correct history graph. Without it, we're lost because we can't tell the forest from the trees. If there's anything you guys know about me, it's that context is king. Of course the end result in terms of the source code is the same, but we know how we got there. But by appending '-no-ff' onto the merge command, you'll retain the context and the merge is maintained. If you merge and you do so by fast forwarding, that context has been lost. The whole idea is that each time you do something, you to keep its identity and know that it came as a result of a particular bug. The 'no-ff' stands for 'no fast forward'. (There's another great article on why rebase is bad.) The thing about rebase and merge is that they creates a single 'branch' that is long and all of the work that you performed for a particular work item or bug or whatever gets lost in the single master branch. Then, when I'd go to push, I'd first pull in changes, rebase, and push. Instead, I'd often just do my work on my own local copy and use master. One of the things about Git that I never worried about too much was leveraging branches for various work items. If you're not using Git, you'd better be using some form of distributed version control. It's a great article in its own right and deserves your attention if you're using Git.

Over a year ago I bumped into a great article about A Successful Git Branching Model. I've been using Git now for several years. Subscribe My New Best Friend: git merge -no-ff

Git rebase fast forward