Why does it always feel so black-and-white? On our projects we do rebases all the time so that topic history is clean. But we merge into the target branch(es) (our merge bot supports merging to old release branches from a single MR). This gives us:
- clean integration branch histories (series of merge commits)
- merge commits can contain metadata (topic-level descriptions, trailers for who reviewed, merge request links, test results, etc.)
- you can be (pretty) sure that `git bisect --first-parent` will not run into any compilation problems (logical conflicts occur, but are fairly rare; use merge queues to be sure)
- none of the "you merged main into your topic" "backwards merges" to deal with too
Merging and rebasing each have their pros and cons, so why not use the pros of each and mitigate a lot of the cons at the same time.
- clean integration branch histories (series of merge commits) - merge commits can contain metadata (topic-level descriptions, trailers for who reviewed, merge request links, test results, etc.) - you can be (pretty) sure that `git bisect --first-parent` will not run into any compilation problems (logical conflicts occur, but are fairly rare; use merge queues to be sure) - none of the "you merged main into your topic" "backwards merges" to deal with too
Merging and rebasing each have their pros and cons, so why not use the pros of each and mitigate a lot of the cons at the same time.