Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiddew | Hacker News Reader

The post considers rebasing the fork. It seems easier to do only merges. You can merge specific upstream commits, or the entire upstream branch. That way you only need to merge in the changes, and not resolve the same conflicts for each downstream commit, every time the upstream is changed.

View on HN

Maintaining a fork by merging upstream into downstream branches would be a mess: upstream and downstream code would be totally entangled, there would no clean way to edit/remove/reorder downstream commits. You can't easily know what you actually changed (not the full diff, but each "atomic" clean change).

The way the author suggests is way cleaner IMO.

It depends on whether the downstream only ever consumes upstream changes, or also often contributes changes to upstream. Rebasing in both directions can result in a messy history, too, especially if upstream isn't very careful in how it accepts pull requests.

Agreed, and in the wild I've indeed seen rebasing used significantly more often than merges for this purpose.

> there would no clean way to edit/remove/reorder downstream commits

Yes, but I consider commits immutable so reordering or editing commits is not a thing that would happen. New commits are appended (either upstream or downstream), and any conflicting changes then of course have to be merged from upstream into downstream.

Merging seems easier? With merging you can get a definite answer about which commits are where. With rebase you’re dealing with changes/patches so the answer is less clear.

But it might be cleaner (for some definition of clean) to have a for which is just N commits on top of the upstream. Which is then rebased periodically.

It's bit hidden but once you enable `git rerere`, it will remember your fixed up rebase conflicts.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rerere

Wow this is super neat. I wonder why it isn’t enabled by default.

I think both are done for long-term forks. Since both are done we can surmise that both are practical.

I suspect that rebase-forks are more common historically. Because the only thing I’ve heard of when it comes to managing changes on top of a version control system (which could be centralized) are “patch queues” or stacks. And those tend to be rebase systems with a different system.

But I have no practical experience with long-lived forks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com