The command tries to find out which commits are really your local ones, and which had come from upstream in an earlier fetch. You may still get conflicts, but they will be genuine conflicts (between p/q/r and a/b+c/d+e/f), and not conflicts caused by b/c conflicting with b+c, etc. What git pull -rebase does, in this case, is: git fetch origin Even a git fetch git rebase origin/foo would not cut it, because commits вЂњbвЂќ and вЂњcвЂќ on one side, and commit вЂњb+cвЂќ on the other, would conflict. His commit chain now looks like this: a-b+c-d+e-f (origin/foo)ДЄ git pull at this point would result in chaos. Meanwhile, in a fit of anti-social rage, the upstream maintainer has not only rebased his вЂњfooвЂќ, he even used a squash or two. Time passes, and you have made some commits on top of your own вЂњfooвЂќ: a-b-c-d-e-p-q-r (foo)

LetвЂ™s say your starting point is this: a-b-c-d-e (origin/foo) (also your local 'foo') HereвЂ™s an explanation of what it does and how. Which means git pull -rebase has to do a little bit more than that. Without going into why they would do that, and how many beers (I prefer rum+coke, thank you!) should be offered in compensation to downstream users, letвЂ™s just try and describe how git helps you deal with it.ДЄ normal git pull is, loosely speaking, something like this (weвЂ™ll use a remote called origin and a branch called foo in all these examples): # assume current checked out branch is 'foo'ДЄt first glance, you might think that a git pull -rebase does just this: git fetch originД«ut that will not help if the upstream rebase involved any вЂњsquashingвЂќ (meaning that the patch-ids of the commits changed, not just their order). This can be a big problem вЂ“ causing messy conflicts for us if weвЂ™re downstream. Sometimes we have an upstream that rebased/rewound a branch weвЂ™re depending on. Gitolite documentation has another /gitolite in the URL, so '' and so ALL my git related stuff gets carried over. That's just an artifact of '' being translated to Those features of the git rebase command are beyond what I want to get into in this article, so we'll skip that for now, but I encourage you to try out the interactive flag.Although this page has a '' URL, this is not about gitolite. I almost always use the -i (aka interactive) flag when I rebase because it makes it easier to reword commit messages, squash commits, or resort the order of commits. In other words, we'd like to 're-base' the working branch with the master branch. If you think of these two git branch like a tree trunk (the tree metaphor is constant in git), you can imagine that we'd like to replace the base of our working branch with the base of our master branch. Let's talk about the name of this command: Rebase.

Luckily, that is effectively what rebasing a branch does! If we caught our working branch back up to master and put those three commits on top, it might look like this:Дoing something like that would make a pull request against master much cleaner and help us avoid merge conflicts. In that case, it'd be really convenient if you could catch your feature branch back up to master and bump your changes to the top of the git history. If your feature branch exists for a few days, it's likely that master will change before you are able to merge your branch back into master.

You can easily replicate this by working on a project with many other developers (like DEV) when you create a feature branch. In reality, it's extremely easy to end up in this situation. The second branch, which I'll call master in this example, has eight commits that don't exist in our working branch. The first branch, which I'll refer to from now on as our working branch, has three commits that don't exist in the second branch. If you're looking closely, you'll have noticed that these two branches are identical from their bases until 13363dd3, where they diverge. Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Git rebase onto