Rebasing

When you make a new commit, that commit is a child of the former commit in the same branch, its parent.

When you merge two branches, you move the branch pointer forward - and if there is a need for a merge commit, it will be added as a child of its two parents.

Rebasing is when you figure out that you don’t like your parents, and decide to swap them out for someone else.

The pointer from a commit to its parent is called the “base”. Rebasing switches that base pointer to another commit parent.

Technical rebase

Git doesn’t do exactly that. What is described above is the functional aspect of what a rebase is.

What it really does is to replay the commit(s) involved onto the the end of the other target parent.