The --update-refs option of git rebase is so useful that I have it on by default in my config. For stacked branches I find it hard to think of scenarios where I wouldn't want it. However, there are cases for non-stacked branches (i.e. other branches pointing at the current HEAD) where updating them is undesirable. In fact, pretty much always, for me. Two examples, both very similar: 1. I have a topic branch which is based off of master; I want to make a copy of that branch and rebase it onto devel, just to try if that would work. I don't want the original branch to be moved along in this case. 2. I have a topic branch, and I want to make a copy of it to make some heavy history rewriting experiments. Again, my interactive rebases would always rebase both branches in the same way, not what I want. In this case I could work around it by doing the experiments on the original branch, creating a tag beforehand that I could reset back to if the experiments fail. But maybe I do want to keep both branches around for a while for some reason. Both of these cases could be fixed by --update-refs not touching any refs that point to the current HEAD. I'm having a hard time coming up with cases where you would ever want those to be updated, in fact. Any opinions? -Stefan
