In my experience, this amount of conflicts typically occurs because 1) most people mass commit a bunch of (mostly unrelated) changes at once, which leads to 2) inexperienced/impatient devs to clobber incoming merge conflicts without doing proper merges (mostly because they can’t make heads or tails of the diffs).
This is very easily mitigated if all developers would make small, related commits (with descriptive commit messages and not “committing changes”). This makes everybody’s life easier because 1) diffs are smaller and readable for conflicts, 2) the dev can see the progression of code through commit history, 3) broken code is more easily revertable (and traceable) if something goes wrong, and 4) it’s easier to cherry pick specific changes if the whole changes cannot be published all at once.
Also, git pull --rebase is your friend and not scary at all. It applies all incoming changes first, then applies your new commits last. 9 out of 10 times it avoids conflicts.
Lastly, use a GUI. There are plenty out there to suit your tastes, and I feel they are a safer and easier alternative than CLI. Some GUIs are very safe and even allow undo operations on most things.
I have seen some juniors really shoot themselves in the foot with rebasing, and I’ve been there as well before. I agree it can be useful, but it definitely requires understanding of what is going on :P
I consider myself above average in terms of Git know how. But I’ve come across situations using rebase where you’re stuck resolving the same conflicts over several commits.
I still don’t understand that part quite well.
This doesn’t happen when you do a normal merge though. Making it easier to manage
That could happen if the base branch has changed a lot since the last time you rebased against it. Git may make you resolve new conflicts that look similar to the last time you resolved them, but they are in fact new conflicts, as far as git can tell.
Only if there are changes in the same files and on the same lines in both branches. And if you’re a commit freak, you should probably be squashing/amending, especially if you’re making multiple commits of changes on the same lines in the same files. The –amend flag exists for a reason. No one needs to see your “fixed things”, “changed things again”, “fixed it for real” type commits.
What I do locally on my branch is my own business.
Honestly, when doing a merge/pull request into the parent branch, that’s when you squash. You don’t need the entire history of a development branch in main.
What I do locally on my branch is my own business.
Lol ok, but don’t expect git to read your mind. Like I said earlier, if people take a day or two to understand the tool, they can adjust their personal workflows to work better within the confines of git.
The reason for this is that git rebase is kind of like executing a separate merge for every commit that is being reapplied. A proper merge on the other hand looks at the tips of the two branches and thus considers all the commits/changes “at once.”
Holy shit! I never took the time to read about it rerere. But it all makes sense now.
However, it’s still a lot of extra steps for what could otherwise be really simple with a regular merge.
Is there really a big advantage in using rebase vs merge other than trying to keep a single line of progress in the history? It’s it really worth all the hassle? Especially if you’re using a squash merge in a pull request…
I don’t think rerere applies here. Once you do a rebase, the rewritten commits should contain the conflict resolutions. The only way conflicts could reoccur on subsequent rebases is if changes reoccur in those same files/lines.
Another solution to this situation is to squash your changes in place so that your branch is just 1 commit, and then do the rebase against your master branch or equivalent.
Works great if you’re willing to lose the commit history on your branch, which obviously isn’t always the case.
Jokes on merge… when a rebase editing goes wrong after +15 commits and six hours, and git hits you with a leadpipe: “do it. Do it again, or reassemble your branch from the reflog.” I.e. you commited a change very early, went over bunch of commits resolving/fixing/improving them and at middle way forget if you should commit --amend or rebase --continue to move forward. Choose wrong, and two large change-sets get irreversilbly squashed together (that absolutely shouldn’t), with no way to undo. Cheers. 👍
To be fair, this is also how VS looks when you open a project fresh from the clone. Or after updating .net versions. .NET is awful about losing references and then claiming thousands of errors. Sometimes just running the build will fix it by relinking the DLLs it couldn’t find.
But also yes, VS with a team can be “fun” if people don’t sync their formatting settings. I once had a junior that kept converting spaces to tabs on every file he’d touch. You’d get it fixed and then he’d screw up his settings again with a VS update or something.
Sometimes I look at the memes around here and wonder wtf y’all are doing. Like, neither my code nor the code at the place I work at are perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a merge do this. Maybe some of the most diverged merges temporarily had a lot of errors because of some refactoring, but then it was just a few find + replaces away from being fixed again. But those were merges where multiple teams had been working on both the original and the fork for years and even then it was usually pretty okay.
It’s really easy to make a gigantic mess using git if you don’t know what you’re doing. As soon as you learn to keep your history mostly linear all those issues go away.
Well, I actually enjoy code review, and I enjoy it on both ends. I learned A LOT thanks to insightful review by my teammates. And I like to pass that knowledge on to juniors when reviewing their code.
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