You and your partner are dating. Each of you has a life before this: your exes, your habits, your questionable mug collection. Those are your branches.
Then you decide to move in together. There are two ways to do it.
🪢 git merge: the honest marriage
You combine your lives and the whole past stays where it was. Her ex is in the history. Your "I'm going to be a DJ" phase is in the history. On top of it all sits one big commit, "Wedding 🎉", tying everything together.
✅ Totally honest. Everyone can see where you both came from.
❌ At family dinners, relatives scroll through your git log and start asking questions.
🔁 git rebase: "there was no one before you"
You take your life and replay it as if it started after you met. One clean, beautiful line. No branches. No DJ phase.
✅ The history looks perfect.
❌ It's not quite you anymore: new commits, different hashes.
⚠️ The golden rule of rebase
Never rebase history that other people have already seen.
Your mum remembers your ex. Your friends remember the DJ phase. Run git push --force on your biography, and the next birthday party will hit a conflict that can't be resolved automatically.
TL;DR:
Local branch, nobody's seen it → rebase, make it pretty
Shared history, everyone knows → merge, and learn to live with it
So, is your team Team Merge or Team Rebase? 👇
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