I am personally a proponent of rebasing, but I'm reading through the recent Hacker News threads to get a sense of the arguments on both sides.
> If you're dealing with a large code base with many submitters, you have to demand that individual submissions apply cleanly. That is isomorphic to demanding that they be rebased.
To play devil's advocate for the merge perspective: wouldn't this also be achieved if the commit author had merged master into his branch first before submitting? It will apply cleanly because conflicts were fixed during the merge, rather than because it was rebased.
> If you're dealing with a large code base with many submitters, you have to demand that individual submissions apply cleanly. That is isomorphic to demanding that they be rebased.
To play devil's advocate for the merge perspective: wouldn't this also be achieved if the commit author had merged master into his branch first before submitting? It will apply cleanly because conflicts were fixed during the merge, rather than because it was rebased.