this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Pretty much everything that can act as a git remote (GitHub, gitlab, etc.) records the activity on a branch and makes it easy to see what the commit sha was before a force push.
But it's a pretty moot point since no one that argues in favor of rebasing is suggesting you use it on shared branches. That's not what it's for. It's for your own feature branches as you work, in which case there is indeed very little risk of any kind of loss.
Ah, you've never worked somewhere where people regularly rebase and force-push to master. Lucky :)
I have no issue with rebasing on a local branch that no other repository knows about yet. I think that's great. As soon as the code leaves local though, things proceed at least to "exercise caution." If the branch is actively shared (like master, or a release branch if that's a thing, or a branch where people are collaborating), IMO rebasing is more of a footgun than it's worth.
You can mitigate that with good processes and well-informed engineers, but that's kinda true of all sorts of dubious ideas.
Pushing to master in general is disabled by policy on the forge itself at every place I've worked. That's pretty standard practice. There's no good reason to leave the ability to push to master on.
There's no reason to avoid force pushing a rebased version of your local feature branch to the remote version of your feature branch, since no one else should be touching that branch. I literally do this at least once a day, sometimes more. It's a good practice that empowers you to craft a high-quality set of commits before merging into master. Doing this avoids the countless garbage
fix typocommits (and spurious merge commits) that you'd have otherwise, making both reviews easier and giving you a higher-quality, more useful history after merge.Why should no one be touching it? You’re basically forcing manually communicated sync/check points on a system that was designed to ameliorate those bottlenecks
If “we work in a way that only one person can commit to a feature”, you may be missing the point of collaborative distributed development.
No, you divide work so that the majority of it can be done in isolation and in parallel. Testing components together, if necessary, is done on integration branches as needed (which you don't rebase, of course). Branches and MRs should be small and short-lived with merges into master happening frequently. Collaboration largely occurs through developers frequently branching off a shared main branch that gets continuously updated.
Trunk-based development is the industry-standard practice at this point, and for good reason. It's friendlier for CI/CD and devops, allows changes to be tested in isolation before merging, and so on.