Question

I understand the scenario presented in Pro Git about The Perils of Rebasing. The author basically tells you how to avoid duplicated commits:

Do not rebase commits that you have pushed to a public repository.

I am going to tell you my particular situation because I think it does not exactly fit the Pro Git scenario and I still end up with duplicated commits.

Let’s say I have two remote branches with their local counterparts:

origin/master    origin/dev
|                |
master           dev

All four branches contains the same commits and I am going to start development in dev:

origin/master : C1 C2 C3 C4
master        : C1 C2 C3 C4

origin/dev    : C1 C2 C3 C4
dev           : C1 C2 C3 C4

After a couple of commits I push the changes to origin/dev:

origin/master : C1 C2 C3 C4
master        : C1 C2 C3 C4

origin/dev    : C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6  # (2) git push
dev           : C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6  # (1) git checkout dev, git commit

I have to go back to master to make a quick fix:

origin/master : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7  # (2) git push
master        : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7  # (1) git checkout master, git commit

origin/dev    : C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6
dev           : C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6

And back to dev I rebase the changes to include the quick fix in my actual development:

origin/master : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7
master        : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7

origin/dev    : C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6
dev           : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7 C5' C6'  # git checkout dev, git rebase master

If I display the history of commits with GitX/gitk I notice that origin/dev now contains two identical commits C5' and C6' which are different to Git. Now if I push the changes to origin/dev this is the result:

origin/master : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7
master        : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7

origin/dev    : C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C5' C6'  # git push
dev           : C1 C2 C3 C4 C7 C5' C6'

Maybe I don’t fully understand the explanation in Pro Git, so I would like to know two things:

1. Why does Git duplicate these commits while rebasing? Is there a particular reason to do that instead of just applying C5 and C6 after C7?
2. How can I avoid that? Would it be wise to do it?

Answer 1

You should not be using rebase here, a simple merge will suffice. The Pro Git book that you linked basically explains this exact situation. The inner workings might be slightly different, but here’s how I visualize it:

• C5 and C6 are temporarily pulled out of dev
• C7 is applied to dev
• C5 and C6 are played back on top of C7, creating new diffs and therefore new commits

So, in your dev branch, C5 and C6 effectively no longer exist: they are now C5' and C6'. When you push to origin/dev, git sees C5' and C6' as new commits and tacks them on to the end of the history. Indeed, if you look at the differences between C5 and C5' in origin/dev, you’ll notice that though the content is the same, the line numbers are probably different — which makes the hash of the commit different.

I’ll restate the Pro Git rule: never rebase commits that have ever existed anywhere but your local repository. Use merge instead.