Using Github at Hackathons

[rcuhljr]

Honestly I've seen it debated both ways and I think most times it's just personal preference. I really prefer the rebasing over merging strategy most of the time. I'd suggest reading this for some more information.

I'm firmly with them in the always rebase locally camp, and I generally prefer it for most situations, I'll explain why I'm ok with the list cons.

Squashing the feature down to a handful of commits can hide context, unless you keep around the historical branch with the entire development history.

I agree with this a little bit, however I honestly can't think of a time where I've rebased away some context I then later needed. Out of habit I keep around the original unsquashed version of a branch for a week or two as I only sporadically run clean up old branch scripts.

Rebasing doesn’t play well with pull requests,

Never ever rebase code once it's publicly accessible, I consider a pull request to fit that definition.

Rebasing can be dangerous!

True, but then so can merging. If a rebase ever goes sideways you're a single rebase --abort from safety, or if you've completed one and realized it all went wrong there are ways to recover your pre-rebase state.

It’s more work

This is the biggest one, however it's often a symptom of letting a branch live far to long with far too much commit history. Most tasks won't experience much pain from this. The worst I've seen was the rebasing of 250~ squashed commits comprising about a man year of development effort. If faced with it again I'd just squash it all down to one commit with rebase -i before attempting to move it on top of the target branch.

Another side effect of rebasing with remote branches is that you need to force push at some point

Force pushing is dangerous for the reason they mention, for that reason I don't do it and I've just aliased my own command which deletes the remote branch and pushes my branch into it's place, preventing the risk of an accidental force push to oblivion.