git pull --rebase

Question

Start situation (no unpushed changes, > indicates the current branch):

o C [> master][origin/master]
|
o B
|
o A
|
...

After a git fetch the log structure often looks like

o E [origin/master]
|
o C'
|
o B'
|
o D
|
| o C [>master]
| |
| o B
|/
o A
|
...

Now git rebase origin/master master often produces conflicts. Is git pull --rebase smarter and just uses git reset to make master also point to E if master==origin/master initially?

Answer 1

git pull --rebase is NOT the same as git fetch; git rebase. Unfortunately the git-pull man page is rather cryptic about the difference:

   --rebase
       Rebase the current branch on top of the upstream branch
       after fetching. If there is a remote-tracking branch
       corresponding to the upstream branch and the upstream branch
       was rebased since last fetched, the rebase uses that
       information to avoid rebasing non-local changes.

It turns out that the difference doesn't involve git reset as the original poster guessed - in fact it involves the reflog (see here if you haven't encountered that term before).

For the complete story around the extra magic in git pull --rebase, see this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/11531502/179332

Answer 2

You can pull with rebase instead of merge - that's the way my team works and it works quite well.

From "A few git tips you didn't know about":

Because branch merges in git are recorded with a merge commit, they are supposed to be meaningful—for example, to indicate when a feature has been merged to a release branch. However, during a regular daily workflow where several team members sync a single branch often, the timeline gets polluted with unnecessary micro-merges on regular git pull. Rebasing ensures that the commits are always re-applied so that the history stays linear.

You can configure certain branches to always do this without the --rebase flag:

#make 'git pull' on master always use rebase
$ git config branch.master.rebase true

You can also set up a global option to set the last property for every new tracked branch:

# setup rebase for every tracking branch
$ git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always