[linkmotif]

What makes it hard is that it’s taught wrong. All this pull/checkout/commit/push whereas for me it took a long time to discover that fetch/rebase/show-branch/reset/checkout —amend, and especially the interactive -p variants, are the core tools that really make it a pleasure to use. They give you flexibility and let you write and rewrite your story, whereas the commands you’re introduced with provide no control to the user. It’s remarkable the number of users who think you can’t rewrite a Git branch.

[ectospheno]

The rebase command is only safe if you never share a branch. Most people use a distributed revision control system to work with others and if you do work with others then rebase is dangerous and should not be used.

Almost every rebase user I've spoken with has no idea what the danger is despite it being clearly discussed in the manual page for rebase and despite rebase being listed as dangerous every time it is mentioned in any manual page.

For the sake of new users everywhere, please stop recommending rebase.

[incog-neato]

This is overly broad dissuasion. `rebase` should not be used if the branch is already shared and built upon by others, but is completely harmless to use on a feature branch.

In fact, it produces cleaner feature branches for review. Tracking the trunk branch with merges into your feature branch makes for a lot of noisy commits and difficult history to read through when the time comes to diagnose a bug. Rebasing, on the other hand, allows you to neatly put all the changes from your branch (and only those changes) into one or a few neatly-packaged commits.

[anyzen]

I strongly disagree. Git rebase is a very useful command, but of course you need to know what you are doing. Git becomes very weird if you try to avoid its core concepts... as far as I'm concerned, use rebase, get yourself cut (or better yet, learn about it before using it) and try not to repeat mistakes.

That said, git porcelain is simply awful. It is inconsistent and full of dangers - there is no way I would dare try new commands without reading up on them, because the names are often misleading. Sometimes I really wish GitHub / GitLab used Mercurial as their foundation. I think the world of programming would be much easier....

[linkmotif]

This is exactly what I'm talking about! Thank you!

There is /nothing/ "dangerous" about rebasing. You just don't rebase branches that are publicly shared without coordinating with the other users, so for some cases (like "master" of an open source project) you don't rebase.

But for your internal workflow, rebase is a KEY TOOL. It's how you write your story of commits. You can't just perfectly nail your commit history the first time you code, unless you are a genius. And what if you're working on a feature, but then you want to commit a certain series chunk of changes to master, so that other features can use that change. Rebase is how you do anything like this. It's core to using and enjoying the beauty of git.

Not to mention reset...

[shandor]

Rebase is not dangerous. It can't be, since it only works on the local repo.

It's non-fast-forward pushes that are dangerous. And they're dangerous whether anyone uses rebase or not.

[stouset]

I rebase pushed branches all the time if I’m the only one who is working on them, even for repos with multiple team members working on them. In almost a decade I can’t think of a single time this has caused problems.

Yes, don’t rebase branches with multiple authors doing parallel work. But I can’t think of many times I’ve even had to work on a feature branch with multiple authors.

[pjc50]

Rebase is context-dependent.

In a gerrit flow, you have to use it quite often, but only on the detached micro-branches that gerrit forces you to use. And the UI provides a nice convenient rebase button.

In a more traditional "trunk" flow, where you're pretending it's svn, you probably want "pull.rebase=true", otherwise you generate a lot of entirely spurious merge commits. This really confused me the first time I used git, long ago.

The "dangerous" case is, as you say, using it to rewrite history that has already been pushed (heresy!). Generally the system will warn you that this requires "--force", at which point you need to stop and think about what you've done.

(It took me a long time to overcome my feeling that history rewrites were inherently wrong - defeating the point of a VCS in some way. I've adapted to it somewhat with the "neatening things up before submitting" view, which took a while to learn. In a traditional VCS there's only one view of the code and everyone shares it.)

[camgunz]

In a lot of workflows I've used, we _always_ rebase against <parent branch> before pushing a PR, the virtue being that the history is cleaner. I definitely don't think it deserves the huge "NEVER USE" sticker you're slapping on it. I use it multiple times a day.

[hnrodey]

False.