My phraseology was wrong, apologies. Yes that is what I was doing. You can probably tell that my default attitude towards git is one of confusion and frustration, this is no different
No worries. I can not claim that it is a simple problem to just immediately understand. Worse, I am not good enough in my understanding, to explain in a message forum. :(
I can say that it is easy, once you understand it more. It will take some time.
Countering that point, though; if you have a codebase that is rapidly changing at all times... there really isn't anything git can do to help.
Well, the problem for me is what I perceive to be the discrepancy between how rebase is supposed to work, and what it actually does when I use it. I would like to think I understand it but I guess you could argue I don't. At any rate I'm not really learning about it, I just don't do it anymore because I kept getting burnt by it.
My teammates have suggested to simply merge master into the branch so I do that now. It adds a commit to the branch, but Github is smart enough not to litter up the PR diff with the merge commit.
Our codebase doesn't change that much, every commit to master has to go through a PR and get approved. So fortunately we don't have to contend with that.
Only thing I can say is that rebase is exactly the same as reseting to the merge base, then cherry picking each individual commit that was lost in the reset. This means if you did 10 commits locally, it may stop 10 times to have you fix things. Versus a merge, which just does a single commit.
That said, I will also say that any worries about having merge commits in the history should largely be overcome. They actually provide useful information and are easy to ignore if you want.
