On 2011-11-06 12:16:41 +0000, Alex Rønne Petersen <[email protected]> said:
Rewriting history in forks is perfectly fine. In fact, many people generally consider it polite for contributors to clean up their history using rebase before sending changes upstream.
Rewriting history in private forks is perfectly fine. Doing so in public forks can be somewhat troublesome. If someone finds a bug in your fork and propose a patch for it you're going to have some fun merging if you've also rewritten history meanwhile.
For instance, this pull request to a topic branch of my forked DMD repository fixed an issue with one of my DMD pull requests: <https://github.com/michelf/dmd/pull/1>. Had I rewritten history while Daniel was preparing this pull request to my topic branch, merging would have to be done manually.
I'm not saying rebasing shouldn't be done -- it certainly produces a cleaner result -- but we should keep in mind that it can make collaboration on topic branches harder.
-- Michel Fortin [email protected] http://michelf.com/
