I don't understand it. Every time I see something about a rebase it's some purist telling me it's "cleaner". Never got it to do what it says on the tin, and never hit a situation that I couldn't solve using more straightforward tools like merge.

[–] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

What's your mental model for a Git commit, and a Git branch?

Once I properly learned those two concepts, understanding rebases became a lot easier.

I'll try to explain it to the best of my abilities.

Think of a commit being a patch - a description of how to take a particular file from one state to another
A branch is a list of patches to be applied in order, from the point where the branch was created until the last commit on the branch

When you rebase a particular branch, what you're essentially doing is taking all of the commits that are currently on your branch, checking out the other branch, and then applying each of the patches in order on that new branch.

A rebase can be cleanly applied if the premise for each commit has not changed when applied, but if the premise has changed, you get a conflict to be resolved before being able to continue the rebase.

I mentally model a rebase a bit as a fast version of how it would look like to build the branch I was on, but on top of the branch I'm rebasing on.

[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That's a good explanation of what it's supposed to do. That was how I understood it as well.

But anytime I've tried it, I've ended up with conflicts where there shouldn't be (like, I already solved that conflict when I merged earlier) and/or completely undesirable results in the end (for instance, some of my changes are just NOT in the result).

So I just gave up on the whole feature. Simpler to just merge the source branch into mine.

[–] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Depending on how structured your commits have been, it can either be very difficult to get a rebase through or a complete breeze. There are some features to make it easier - rerere being the main one I'm thinking about.

[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

Is that what interactive rebase tools use?

I don't do CLI git