Yes git rebase is a type of lie, but it is white lie that is far more useful than the truth. (you shouldn't rebase any branch that isn't a temporary working branch though) Keeping the history clean is a far worthier goal than never rewriting history. ( In fact if I had to work with a DVCS that didn't support rebasing, I would recreate the commits by hand, which is tedious and error prone. ) In fact I prefer branches to be merged into master with git merge --ff-only --no-ff which has the effect of saying "this whole temporary branch is actually only one commit that was entirely made sometime after the last commit on master". It doesn't squash the commits, it just makes them easier to skip over when doing git bisect. I can only imagine how screwed up the history would be on a long-lived temporary branch if you kept merging from master instead of rebasing.