Git Workflow Examples

Fixing Merge Conflicts on your PR

For MAUI pull requests (PRs), we prefer using rebase instead of merge. Rebasing creates a clean, linear commit history by applying your changes on top of the latest changes from the base branch. This approach avoids unnecessary merge commits, making the history easier to read, review, and debug. A clean history also simplifies operations such as bisects and rollbacks, leading to a smoother integration process.

1. Basic Rebase

To rebase your current branch onto another branch (e.g., main):

# Ensure you're on your working branch
git checkout feature-branch

# Ensure your 
git fetch origin

# Rebase onto main. 
git rebase origin/main

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2. Rebase with --onto

Use --onto to rebase a series of commits from one branch onto a different base. This is useful when you want to move a branch starting from a specific commit to a new base commit.

Assume:

• old-base is the commit where your branch originally diverged.
• new-base is the target commit you want as a new starting point.
• feature-branch is your branch with commits after old-base.

# Switch to the feature branch
git checkout feature-branch

# Rebase commits after old-base onto new-base
git rebase --onto new-base old-base feature-branch

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3. Resetting Your Branch to the Remote

Sometimes you need to align your local branch with its remote counterpart. This can be done using a hard reset.

# Fetch the latest changes from the remote
git fetch origin

# Reset your current branch to the remote state
git reset --hard origin/your-branch

Be cautious: --hard discards any local changes.