Chapter 8. Keeping History Clean

The previous chapter, Merging Changes Together, described how to join changes developed by different people (as described in Chapter 5, Collaborative Development with Git), or just developed in a separate feature branch (as shown in Chapter 6, Advanced Branching Techniques). One of the techniques was rebase, which can help bring a branch to be merged to a better state. But if we are rewriting history, perhaps it would be possible to also modify the commits being rebased to be easier for review, making the development steps of a feature clearer? If rewriting is forbidden, can one make history cleaner without it? How do we fix mistakes if we cannot rewrite history?

This chapter will answer all those questions. It ...

Get Git: Mastering Version Control now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.