Fixing rebase rather than avoiding it

[Ben Finney]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv at wanadoo.es> writes:

> Rebase is useful for keeping a linear history, when it is right to do
> so. Too often a merge is just useless noise.

That's mixing up separate concerns.

If a person finds the merge information to be noise, the tool should
support that (as Bazaar does with its ‘--levels N’ option, which
defaults to hiding merged revisions).

There's no need to *remove* the data from the history, and lots of
reasons to want to keep it: consistency with other branches sharing an
ancestor, tracking down just what happened when necessary, knowing that
every revision represents an actual working tree state that was
committed, etc.

-- 
 \         “The double standard that exempts religious activities from |
  `\       almost all standards of accountability should be dismantled |
_o__)                   once and for all.” —Daniel Dennett, 2010-01-12 |
Ben Finney