Confused about github rebasing

[James Miller]

On 16 March 2012 17:09, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>> Generally I find that pulls should be rebased, ff-only, and local
>> merges done with --no-ff. This means that you have merge history in
>> the tree, which can be useful when trying to do code archaeology, and
>> pulls are forced to be merged properly, rather than using a merge
>> commit, avoiding annoying messages in the log.

> Why should merges be --no-ff? Doesn't that create a whole bunch of
> "spurious" commits in the history?

Not really, unless you do some really weird stuff. Its mostly due to
not re-writing history, fast forwards essentially "import" your
commits into the current branch, making it hard to track where work
was done, since commits aren't aware of what branch they are in. I
just find it keeps things a little more sensible and friendly for
everyone else, since when pushing there is a specific commit + message
that people can see, rather than a sudden block of new commits.

>> Git is a strange beast, one moment it is peacful and helpful, the next
>> it is scary and threatening to eat your files.
> [...]
>
> The way you worded it made me misread the last phrase as "threatening to
> eat your face". :-P

That too

--
James Miller