Question

I have a situation where I’ve got a release candidate branch for our currently “frozen” release candidate, a master branch (branched from release candidate) for the most current stable work, and a topic branch (branched from master) for a little expermientation that I’m working on. Master is currently at the same commit as the release candidate.

If the release candidate moves forward a few commits, is there any functional difference between rebasing master onto release and topic onto release vs master onto release and topic onto master? Do the refs change and if so if there a reason to prefer one over the other?

I should clarify that this repo is for my own local source control – our team uses a different SCM, so I don’t have to worry about fracking things up for anyone else – I’m the only one who ever commits to this repo.

Answer 1

I’m not sure I understand your question correctly, but generally

git checkout a; git rebase c; git checkout b; git rebase c;

will result in a tree like this:

--c----a
  +----b

whereas

git checkout a; git rebase c; git checkout b; git rebase a;

will result in a tree like this:

--c----a----b

My suggestion is: just try to picture in your head what you would like the resulting tree to look like and read the examples on the git-rebase man page.