Welcome to LeviFREE's Blog

1. The Essential Difference Between the Two#

• merge: Preserves divergent history, adds a new merge commit.
• rebase: Rewrites the commit baseline, making the history linear.

Simply put:

• If you want to see the authentic development branch trajectory, use merge.
• If you want a clean main-line history, use rebase.

2. Recommended Rules (Ready for Implementation)#

1. Personal Feature Branches: Rebase is allowed. Clean up commits before submitting a PR.
2. Main Branch (main/master): Rebasing history is strictly forbidden. Only accept controlled merges.
3. Public Branches: Once a public branch has been developed upon by others, never force push a rebase.

3. Common Workflow Templates#

1
git checkout feature/login
2
git fetch origin
3
git rebase origin/main
4
# After resolving conflicts
5
# git rebase --continue
6

7
git push --force-with-lease

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git checkout main
2
git pull origin main
3
git merge --no-ff feature/login
4
git push origin main

4. Conflict Handling and Risk Control#

The easiest way to crash is “modifying business logic while rebasing.” Recommendations:

• During the rebase conflict phase, only resolve the necessary conflicts.
• Make logic changes in a separate commit.
• Sync large branches with upstream in small steps daily to reduce the volume of conflicts at one time.

5. Rollback Strategies#

• In merge mode, you can directly rollback the merge commit.
• In squash mode, rollback is simpler, but you lose the semantics of intermediate commits.

Therefore, you must make a trade-off between “historical brevity” and “historical detail.”

6. A Practical Team Convention#

• Before PR Merge: Must pass CI.
• Before PR Merge: Self-check commit history (remove noise commits like fix typo).
• Before Release: Create tags for high-risk changes.

Summary#

There is no absolute superiority between rebase and merge; it only matters whether it fits the team’s collaboration model. Writing the rules into team documentation and executing them consistently is far more important than any “preference debate.”