alt Hacker NewsI'll be honest, as a fairly skilled and experienced programmer who isn't a git expert, I know what HEAD means, but when I'm rebasing I really have no idea. It all seems to work out in the end because my collaborative work is simple and usually 2–3 people only, so I'm never rebasing against a ton of commits I lack context for (because 90% of them are my commits since I'm usually dealing with PRs to my open source projects rather than someone else's).
HEAD is "the thing we're editing now" but that's not terribly useful when rebasing since you're repeatedly editing a fake history.
Git leaks a lot of implementation details into its UX. Rebasing is meant to be equivalent to checking out the "base" branch and cherry picking commits onto it. Therefore "ours" during a rebase is the base branch.
The meaning of "ours" and "theirs" is always the same, but the "base" of the operation is reversed compared to what you might be used to during merge.
Rebasing can be confusing and hard and messy, but once I learned that rule and took the time to internalize it, I at least never got confused on this particular detail again.
> fake history
That's the thing, it's not actually fake history. Git really is doing the things it looks like it's doing during a rebase. That's why you can do all kinds of weird tricks like stopping in the middle to reset back a commit in order to make a new intervening commit. The reason you can abort at any time with (almost) no risk is because the old history is still hanging around in the database and won't be removed until GC runs, usually long after the rebase is settled.