Rebasing merge commits

What's the general recommendation on rebasing after creating a merge commit on my branch? I realize rebase has the -p option but it seems like it does a lot of complicated stuff, and it discourages interactive rebase with the option.

My situation is simple: I have a topic1 branch that has a few commits on it. During my work, I notice someone else implements a small bug fix that I need. I do a `git merge --no-ff` to force that into my branch as a separate merge commit. After that, I continue my work on my local topic1 branch as usual. When I want latest from master, I do `git rebase master`. However now that I have a merge commit on my branch, things get complicated.

What's a good workflow for this, since it seems pretty common?

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 01:11:06PM -0500, Robert Dailey wrote:

Basically, rebase does not do anything magic. It just cherry-picks commits over a custom revision. You could do it manually: reset to the master and then cherry-pick all your commits (or whichever you would like to pick) from the older topic1. git rebase --onto would be useful to make it a bit less manual it there are many commits and few merges.

I used to do it myself, but later I have made my own rebase which can somehow handle merges: https://github.com/max630/git-rebase2/ You could try it also.