Advantage of git pull --rebase to git pull

[ArdaSaygan]

I learnt that using git pull may disturb the linearity of the commit history. It's suggested that first using git pull --rebase and using git pull only if rebase doesn't work.

I heard this practice here, what are your thought on this? If you agree, we can add it to the Contribution Guide

@bounswe/bounswe2025group9

[orbitstabilizer]

If you follow existing contribution guide you wont encounter such issue. I should elaborate on this later..

[orbitstabilizer]

First, note that the main branch is typically the only branch where multiple people might be working on different features or fixes simultaneously (If everyone obeys the Contribution Guide). We maintain the main branch in a linear fashion, and all contributions are made through pull requests. Therefore, when you run git pull on your local main branch, it should ideally result in a fast-forward merge without any conflicts.

However, issues can arise when multiple people are working on different branches, and one pull request (PR) gets merged before another. If this happens, and the changes in the upstream main branch conflict with the changes in your branch, you’ll have two options to preserve a linear history in the main branch:

• Merge the upstream main branch into your feature branch (git merge origin/main # ) and push the merge commit to your PR.
• Rebase your branch onto the updated main branch (git rebase origin/main or similarly git pull --rebase origin main). This option will result in a cleaner, linear commit history on your local branch.
  In either case, squash and merge to main will result in a linear history of main branch.

Using git pull --rebase is a good way to keep your local branch up to date with the upstream main branch without introducing merge commits. However, if you’ve already pushed your changes to a remote repository (GitHub), rebasing will rewrite your commit history, and you will need to force push to update the remote branch.

Personally, I recommend pushing a merge commit if you've already pushed your changes to avoid the need for a force push (to the PR). On the other hand, if you haven’t published your changes yet, rebasing is a cleaner option and is safe to do.