On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:55:33 +0100 Wolfgang Denk wd@denx.de wrote:
Rebasing the master branch, i. e. the one I'll be pullung from?
Are you sure that is a good idea? Note that I (and probably others) will be pulling from that branch, and not only once!
That depends on whether or not you want your commit history filled with "merge with upstream/master" crap or not.
You should only pull when explicitly requested to do so. In that case, if the branch was newly rebased, there will be a clean, linear history from the tip of your master branch to the tip of the one being pulled.
If there are conflicting changes and the merge needs manual intervention, you abort the merge and tell the one sending the pull request that it didn't merge cleanly, please rebase.
When you rebase a branch, you are changing its history in a way that will cause problems for anyone who already has a copy ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ of the branch in their repository and tries to pull updates ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ from you. You should understand the implications of using git ^^^^^^^^^ rebase on a repository that you share.
And that is, IMO, exactly why you shouldn't be pulling from the master branch in the first place. People who pull regularly to test stuff that is in progress will run into this problem, and they are most likely to pull the master branch because that's the default.
There are two different kinds of users involved here: You (and other maintainers that are "upstream" from someone), and regular users who want to test stuff. Upstream maintainers should receive a clean history, i.e. from a branch that is frequently rebased. At the same time, we should avoid exposing testers to the problems of dealing with a branch that is rebased all the time.
So we need (at least) two different branches that are maintained in different ways, and I think it's easier to tell you, Wolfgang and other upstream maintainers, to pull from a non-master branch than to tell everyone else in the world.
Just my two cents.
Haavard