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Git Rebase For Nested Branches
If rebasing becomes tedious, you might be doing it wrong
Understanding Git rebase took me some time. Just as I was building confidence in my skills, I discovered that, sometimes, some rebases felt off. I had painful conflicts. Some of them were not even supposed to happen!
Worse, I could not tell why those rebases, in particular. The chances are, I was doing something wrong.
The Nested Branch Issue
First, I recommend checking out my previous article to get more familiar with Git rebase:
I’ll take this opportunity to extend that article’s example. Assuming that my next task requires awesome_branch’s content, I’ll need to create a branch from it. I called it nested_branch.
I’m aiming at merging both awesome_branch and nested_branch into develop. Before I can do so, my other branches have probably moved on. I’m likely to face one of the following situations:
develophas evolved, making bothawesome_branchandnested_branchbehinddevelop.- Something comes up on
awesome_branchand new commits are needed.
(1) requires me to rebase awesome_branch on develop before going any further. Same with (2) between nested_branch and awesome_branch.
Both situations won’t be an issue to merge awesome_branch eventually. Let’s follow up with (1) after merging awesome_branch:
