Add daily email for 2024-03-31

Making Git work the way you want

source/_daily_emails/2024-03-31.md

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+---
+title: Making Git work the way you want
+date: 2024-03-31
+permalink: archive/2024/03/31/making-git-work-the-way-you-want
+tags:
+    - software-development
+    - git
+cta: ~
+snippet: |
+    Merge or rebase - which do you use?
+---
+
+Another question that followed my recent Git emails was, " I assume you use rebase over merge?"
+
+The short answer is "yes". I like to keep the history of my repositories clean and simple to read by keeping the logs linear and not full of merge commits.
+
+The longer answer is that I do merges, but only fast-forward merges, at least by default.
+
+If, when merging, Git can fast-forward my branch to the latest commit without creating a merge commit, it will do so.
+
+If not, I can then rebase my changes to make them linear and fast-forwardable. Alternatively, if the commits have already been pushed and cannot be overwritten, I can explicitly allow a non-fast-forward merge in that situation.
+
+I have Git configured to work this way as that's how I want it to work, and that configurability is something I like about Git.
+
+If you want to see how I have Git configured, my settings are in [my dotfiles repository][dotfiles] (note this file is written in the Nix language as I use Nix to manage my configuration).
+
+If you're working in a team, I'd suggest having a common configuration for everyone and defined rules for how you're going to use Git (branch names, merge or rebase, etc) to avoid inconsistencies.
+
+[dotfiles]: https://github.com/opdavies/dotfiles.nix/blob/462eff64f227332d58c7c3652eeaa88b692c064d/lib/shared/modules/git.nix#L95-L135