Using rebase this way is not harmful, but the author didn't explain the situation when it is! As usual, the Pro Git book does a great job explaining: http://pr

Using rebase this way is not harmful, but the author didn't explain the situation when it is! As usual, the Pro Git book does a great job explaining: http://progit.org/book/ch3-6.html http://progit.org/book/ch3-6.html In short, if your team develops with an old-school, SVN type model, where there is one reference repo (the remote) that all developers pull from and push to, rebase to your hearts content. But if your team pulls from each other, you really want to be careful with rebasing. I believe this is how the Linux kernel is developed, which explains all of the warnings about git rebasing. After all, it's logical to assume that you should do exactly as the Linux kernel developers, for whom git was created, do!