Git isn’t just something you have to put up with when working with other developers. Git is a wonderful tool that allows you to manage your code, its evolution and help you recover from mistakes should they arise. One of the things that people are intimidated by is git rebase.

Let’s look at an example. You’re working on a team with two other developers. You have a blessed repository that sits on your company’s server. Everyone is working on the same project but on slightly different tasks. Everyone is working on the master branch. You write a bit of code here and there, you commit a bunch of times and then it’s time to share your code with the rest of the team by pushing it up to the shared repository.

You run git push but receive an error saying that there are changes on the server and your commit cannot be fast-forwarded. No big deal, right? You run git pull to download the changes that you don’t have and automatically merge your changes in. Then you can git push again and it will work just fine.

The problem is that it makes the history of your project messy.

#+BEGIN_SRC console

This article was first published on May 14, 2011. As you can see, there are no comments. I invite you to email me with your comments, criticisms, and other suggestions. Even better, write your own article as a response. Blogging is awesome.