overtone/overtone — comment on commit 51667fa05bb428d5d7153513a899e1bb9c26c1f7
File:  line 0
By samaaron:

To avoid such large merge commits, you could rebase. Rather than pull, I tend to fetch which just grabs all the updates and makes no modifications to any of my branches. If I haven't done too much work, (i.e. one or two minor commits) it then makes sense for me to rebase - this will roll back my commits, apply those of the external branch, then re-apply mine on the end in a linear sequence:

git fetch
git rebase origin/master
git push