Request for D core devs: git pull --rebase

[Michel Fortin]

On 2011-11-06 12:16:41 +0000, Alex Rønne Petersen <xtzgzorex at gmail.com> said:

> Rewriting history in forks is perfectly fine. In fact, many people 
> generally consider it polite for contributors to clean up their history 
> using rebase before sending changes upstream.

Rewriting history in private forks is perfectly fine. Doing so in 
public forks can be somewhat troublesome. If someone finds a bug in 
your fork and propose a patch for it you're going to have some fun 
merging if you've also rewritten history meanwhile.

For instance, this pull request to a topic branch of my forked DMD 
repository fixed an issue with one of my DMD pull requests: 
<https://github.com/michelf/dmd/pull/1>. Had I rewritten history while 
Daniel was preparing this pull request to my topic branch, merging 
would have to be done manually.

I'm not saying rebasing shouldn't be done -- it certainly produces a 
cleaner result -- but we should keep in mind that it can make 
collaboration on topic branches harder.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/