Re: merge into branch currently not active / checked out

On 2007-06-17 12:16:35 +0200, Thomas Glanzmann wrote:

the problem is. Getting a patch into mutt takes several years. At
least it took for the hcache. So what I do is keep my patches
up2date on top of there HEAD. So I prefer topic branches. And my
patches throw _once_ in 4 years a conflict that was not
automatically resolved. I used bitkeeper before, now I use git.

For this use case, I'd say rebasing is the right thing to do --
otherwise you accumulate a 4-year-long history of uninteresting
merges, as Junio warned.

There are two cases where rebasing is worse than a "real" branch
that's merged instead of rebased:

  1. Other people base their work on yours, and need to be able to
     pull. They want a stable foundation to build on, one that doesn't
     move.

  2. Your work is large enough that it's too much work to rebase it.
     (This also implies that when you merge, you get interesting
     conflicts, since for the case of autoresolved conflicts, rebasing
     isn't that much more expensive than merging.)

Since you describe your work as "a patch", I'm guessing neither excuse
applies to you. :-)

I don't push my work other than in patches that is, so I am going to
give it a try. I always wanted to try rebase, but I never actually
did try it.

<advertisement>
  You could also try StGIT. Rebasing a patch series on top of a git
  branch is what it does.
</advertisement>

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle