Question

I have two developers working simultaneously, one on master (dev1) and one on another branch (dev2). The master is being treated as the “mainline”. Dev1 regularly merges the changes from the branch of dev2 as follows:

git checkout master
git merge origin/branch1
git push origin master 

This merges the branch with the master for a deployment, but dev2 also wants to get the latest changes from the master after the merge is complete. I am thinking this is the best approach:

git checkout branch1
git rebase master

Is this correct?

In Github, I noticed that the branch they were working on no longer appears and no one deleted it. I’m pretty sure rebase or merge will not delete the branch unless you tell it to. Let me know otherwise.

Basically, the graph would look something like:

     b1  b2   b3 b4...
    /      \ /     \
   m1   m2  m3  m4  m5...

m3 and m5 are where dev1 will merge b2 and b4, respectively.

Answer 1

The rebase is only valid if dev2 is rebasing unpublished commits.

But dev2 rebased commits already pushed to origin (and potentially already merged by dev1 into master), then it is not the right approach, because the SHA1 are changed, and the next merge of branch1 by dev1 won’t just merge new commits, but all commits, even those already merged.

In this specific situation, dev2 needs to merge master with git merge master – that will avoid those problems.