Pragmatic Guide to Git

16	Rewriting History by Rebasing

Rebasing commits is the one concept in Git that has no counterpart inside the traditional version control world. Using git rebase, you can rewrite the history of a repository in a variety of ways. It is one of the most powerful commands in Git, which makes it one of the most dangerous.

rebase takes a series of commits (normally a branch) and replays them on top of another commit (normally the last commit in another branch). The parent commit changes so all the commit IDs are recalculated. This can cause problems for other developers who have your code because the IDs don’t match up.

There’s a simple rule of thumb with git rebase: use it as much as you want on local commits. Once you’ve shared changes ...