How to properly rebase or merge and keep the branch when using Gitflow

[Lee Johnson]

Here's what my graph looks like:

Screen Shot 2015-01-11 at 11.03.48 PM.png

I want to keep the feature/deployScripts branch, but I want it to have all the latest code from develop. I assume I need to rebase, or do I right-click on develop and "Merge develop into feature/deployScripts"?

Screen Shot 2015-01-11 at 11.03.48 PM.png ‏144 KB

[Balazs Szakmary · Accepted solution]

You can do either of those. The difference between the two is how the history graph will look afterwards. (If you want to see, create a copy of your clone folder and do the rebase in one of the copies, the merge in the other.)

(On your screenshot, it seems that the feature/deployScripts branch is not checked out, first you need to check that branch out.)

[Lee Johnson]

Can you explain more about the history. I went with merge and when I look at branch's history it's the same as the branch I merged from so it's clean but shows an accurate history. I should mentioned that I squashed my commits first. So all in all I'm happy with the result. Any downsides to doing it this way? If it rebased instead how would the history be different?

[Balazs Szakmary]

First of all, since you only had one unique commit in your branch, the squash did not really do anything (it would combine your commits into one). The rebase/merge story is a rather long one. It is quite well explained here: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing

[Lee Johnson]

I squashed before I sent the screenshot. :-) Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.