Hipsnip

“ Git has a rebase command which allows you to take a local branch and change its branch point to a more recent revision. For example, if one is working on a new feature for a product, a local branch may have been started from the 1.0 release. If while still working on the feature the main product line has been updated to 1.1, it may be desirable to pull in the 1.0->1.1 changes onto the local feature branch and treat it as a branch from 1.1 instead of 1.0. In most other systems, this is done by merging the 1.1 changes onto the branch. Merging is the right thing to do from an SCM perspective, where the focus is on ‘reproducibility of past states’. However, when the focus is ‘authoring a clean software revision history’, rebasing is sometimes a superior method. git-rebase allows you to make a previously non-linear history linear, keeping the history cleaner. To be fair, the same deltas are produced by simply merging every commit from the 1.0 version to the 1.1 version individually, and committing them individually. Rebasing is about safely doing this and then deleting the old 1.0 based versions so they don’t clutter the tree. ” - DVCSAnalysis - support - Analysis of Git and Mercurial - Google Code