My biggest issue with rebase from a learners perspective is that you get conflicts that simply don’t happen with merge.
I’ve had experiences where I’m trying to rebase a branch and it keeps flagging my most recent changes in the rebase when the intention is that I want all previous changes applied then as a final step show me a conflict if applicable, don’t show me one when it’s not the “final” step.
Admittedly maybe I’m doing it wrong.
I also don’t like how rebasing “main” onto my branch actually seemingly takes my branch and rebases it onto “main”? Maybe that’s a fault in my IDE not entirely sure
I think the difficulty with rebase and merge is much about semantics. When you "rebase" what does that word suggest to you? To me it sounds like "Base Again". So I'm changing the base from which I started the current branch to something else?
Not quite. That would mean that my old base is REPLACED by something else, right?
Instead rebase means take some other branch then put all the changes in the current branch on top of it, keeping everything in the current branch but just adding them on top of something else, right?
It grokked with me when in my IDE (WebStorm) I saw the menu-option allowing me to choose another branch and perform "Check Out and Rebase on top of the current branch". So you don't just "rebase a branch", you combine two branches. And when you combine two things here the order matters, and it is easy to confuse the order.
Similarly if you merge two branches, which one overrides? The left or the right operand? It is easy to get confused. Maybe I am. It is not my fault.
It does not help that git really is checkpoints rather than deltas. The semantic difference is usually ignorable, but it can matter when you're trying to rewrite history. It's coming up with deltas on the fly, and if it gets confused it can get very very lost.
Every rebase really is at least three branches: what you're merging into, where you started, and where you are now. And God help you if somebody rewrote history on any of those.
The fact that all of these have terrible names makes it so much worse.
I’ve had experiences where I’m trying to rebase a branch and it keeps flagging my most recent changes in the rebase when the intention is that I want all previous changes applied then as a final step show me a conflict if applicable, don’t show me one when it’s not the “final” step.
Admittedly maybe I’m doing it wrong.
I also don’t like how rebasing “main” onto my branch actually seemingly takes my branch and rebases it onto “main”? Maybe that’s a fault in my IDE not entirely sure