Re: Amending merge commits?

Sergei Organov wrote:

Basically always in my book. ;-)

When people turn on 'pull --rebase', they are asking for a clean, simplified history where their changes are small discrete patches in a clump on top of upstream.

When someone has made a merge by mistake (with 'git pull' before remembering to do an autosetuprebase, or with 'git merge' instead of cherry-picking some patches they needed), the current --rebase=true behavior can be a good way of cleaning up.

That said, in some specific workflows, --rebase=preserve may work better than --rebase=true. My hunch is that even those workflows are not currently handled well with --rebase=preserve, alas.

A clearer explanation of --rebase (maybe with sub-headings for each choice *true*, *false*, and *preserve*?) sounds useful. An illustration in the EXAMPLES section of git-pull(1) of the difference between these three modes and when to use them would be even more helpful.

Thanks, Jonathan