Best-Practice "Merge vs. Rebase" searched...

[Alexander Schatten]

I am working in different projects, where I favour Mercurial, but one colleage pushes GIT (so some internal nerd-discussions running, ok).

Now, yesterday we had a discussion about Rebasing. I have to say, that I once read the documentation on Mercurial rebase extension, but did not really understand the concept. Or to put it differently, I understood more or less what it does, but I did not really get *why* I would want to do that.

Now my colleague is apparently a big rebase fan and the history in his project is pretty flat. In this project a lot of (students) are working in parallel, so there is a lot merging to be done, and he does most of it via rebasing as I understand it. One of his arguments is, that a complex branched history makes problems, when you want to extract certain parts of a repository into a new project later (but there were other arguments as well).

I had no real good arguments, but my feeling is, that this is not the best idea. I then searched a little bit in the Mercurial docs, in the "Definitive guide" and found actually nothing on that topic. I found some blog-posts like this one:

http://blog.experimentalworks.net/2009/03/merge-vs-rebase-a-deep-dive-into-the-mysteries-of-revision-control/

If I understand this one right, he is pretty much against rebasing, except for specific and rare situations.

Now, can anyone of you experts give me a more founded opinion? Point me to some good sources?

I would really appreciate that.


thank you very much



Alex