git rebase onto remote updates

Question

I work with a small team that uses git for source code management. Recently, we have been doing topic branches to keep track of features then merging them into master local

Answer 1

For our team we set something up which works very well and does not use rebase at all.

We cut our work in Jira tickets which do not take too long, typically 1-2 days effort. Each dev creates a branch per ticket and works on this branch. When ready to share this is pushed to the central server.

The central server is monitored by a hudson CI server which pulls the changes, merges all updated branches, rebuilds the software, runs the tests and pushes everything to the central master git repository.

From there we pull it back to our repositories. We do regularly (i.e. every couple of days) merge our working branches with the central master to keep them 'close'.

Since nobody is working on the 'merging' machine and nobody other than the CI server touches the master, we have very infrequently merging issues (in about 1-2% of the commits). And these are quickly resolved on the build server by cleaning the workspace. We found we could have avoided most of these by keeping the branches short and merging with the remote master before pushing.

I also fond that merging is much more robust than rebasing and requires a lot less of rework.