I’m sure you’re here to educate me, but this is not about criss-cross merges between two different work branches, this is about whether it’s better to rebase a work branch onto the main branch, or to pull the changes from the main branch to the work branch.
I have an early draft of a blog post about them :) as a source control expert who built both these systems and tooling on top of them for many years, I think they're the biggest and most fundamental reason rebases/linear history are better than merges.
> whether it’s better to rebase a work branch onto the main branch, or to pull the changes from the main branch to the work branch.
The problem with this is that the latter has an infinitely higher chance of resulting in criss-cross merges than the former (which is 0).
It's definitely not 0 because rebase heavy workflows involve the rerere cache which is a minefield of per-repo hidden merge changes. You get the results of "criss-cross merges" as "ghosts" you can't easily debug because there aren't good UI tools for the rerere cache. About the best you can do is declare rerere cache bankruptcy and make sure every repo clears their rerere cache.
I know that worst case isn't all that common or everyone would be scared of rebases, but I've seen it enough that I have a healthy disrespect of rebase heavy workflows and try to avoid them when given the option/in charge of choosing the tools/workflows/processes.
I’m sure you’re here to educate me, but this is not about criss-cross merges between two different work branches, this is about whether it’s better to rebase a work branch onto the main branch, or to pull the changes from the main branch to the work branch.
I have an early draft of a blog post about them :) as a source control expert who built both these systems and tooling on top of them for many years, I think they're the biggest and most fundamental reason rebases/linear history are better than merges.
> whether it’s better to rebase a work branch onto the main branch, or to pull the changes from the main branch to the work branch.
The problem with this is that the latter has an infinitely higher chance of resulting in criss-cross merges than the former (which is 0).
It's definitely not 0 because rebase heavy workflows involve the rerere cache which is a minefield of per-repo hidden merge changes. You get the results of "criss-cross merges" as "ghosts" you can't easily debug because there aren't good UI tools for the rerere cache. About the best you can do is declare rerere cache bankruptcy and make sure every repo clears their rerere cache.
I know that worst case isn't all that common or everyone would be scared of rebases, but I've seen it enough that I have a healthy disrespect of rebase heavy workflows and try to avoid them when given the option/in charge of choosing the tools/workflows/processes.
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