I'm working on another branch of my repo and need to bring in changes from the master branch. I'm in the habit of doing git rebase master, and all works fine. However, in a couple of recent projects, I'm seeing commits repeating in the logs, and rebasing tends to complain (loudly):
$ git log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate ...
* 4988d49 - (2 hours ago) Merge branch 'branchname' of ... 3
|\
| * e979be1 - (2 days ago) change verbiage 10
| * 93a1c80 - (2 days ago) Merge branch 'branchname' of ... 2
| |\
| | * 4e4e790 - (2 weeks ago) Merge branch 'branchname' of ... 1
| | |\
| | | * 87cc232 - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 3
| | | * 3d5cf09 - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 2
| | | * aea4cbd - (9 weeks ago) change verbiage 1
| | * | a7043ef - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 6
| | * | fa3413b - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 5
| | * | be038a7 - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 4
| | * | 37cb1e6 - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 3
| | * | 1ab71c6 - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 2
| | * | c4560f4 - (9 weeks ago) change verbiage 1
| * | | d3211fd - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 6
| * | | 72a2a4a - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 5
| * | | ae1c123 - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 4
| * | | 8328c08 - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 3
| * | | e52588f - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 2
| * | | 114cbec - (9 weeks ago) change verbiage 1
* | | | 38bd6ce - (2 hours ago) change verbiage 9
* | | | 5aaf360 - (2 hours ago) change verbiage 8
* | | | 2745790 - (2 days ago) change verbiage 7
* | | | 7bb613f - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 6
* | | | 726a312 - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 5
* | | | 771dd7f - (2 weeks ago) change verbiage 4
* | | | b451926 - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 3
* | | | 484d5dc - (8 weeks ago) change verbiage 2
* | | | 630df34 - (9 weeks ago) change verbiage 1
(I've changed the commit messages for simplicity. There really is only one branch being displayed here, despite four "pipe lines".) I've done a few rebases on this project, and I think they can be traced rather simply based on the number of repeats of (say) change verbiage 1.
I thought I was doing a "best practices" thing with project workflow by rebasing to merge. I thought at least one of the previous rebases was done with -no-ff, but I cannot see a difference in the behavior.
When the commits are replayed, they conflict (obviously, placing one commit on top of itself is problematic), so I'm forced to do an interactive rebase, removing all duplicate commits.
Lacking access to the repo itself, is this a problem with my workflow? Is it indicative of other problems in the branch?