git pull --rebase

Question

Start situation (no unpushed changes, > indicates the current branch):

o C [> master][origin/master]
|
o B
|
o A
|
...

After

Answer 1

You can pull with rebase instead of merge - that's the way my team works and it works quite well.

From "A few git tips you didn't know about":

Because branch merges in git are recorded with a merge commit, they are supposed to be meaningful—for example, to indicate when a feature has been merged to a release branch. However, during a regular daily workflow where several team members sync a single branch often, the timeline gets polluted with unnecessary micro-merges on regular git pull. Rebasing ensures that the commits are always re-applied so that the history stays linear.

You can configure certain branches to always do this without the --rebase flag:

#make 'git pull' on master always use rebase
$ git config branch.master.rebase true

You can also set up a global option to set the last property for every new tracked branch:

# setup rebase for every tracking branch
$ git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always