SubmittingPatches: rebase to resolve conflicts

pull request is not supposed to contain merge commits

Signed-off-by: Kefu Chai <kchai@redhat.com>

diff --git a/SubmittingPatches.rst b/SubmittingPatches.rst
index 3e2624bbcb3c22489344207f94ff7f51b4f10c9f..87855d5f813b469c19773a7c3b5d645f18e484b0 100644 (file)
--- a/SubmittingPatches.rst
+++ b/SubmittingPatches.rst
@@ -258,6 +258,19 @@ feature.
    to ping the reviewer again or comment on the pull request to ensure the updates
    are noticed.
 
+   Sometimes your change could be based on an outdated parent commit and has
+   conflicts with the latest target branch, then you need to fetch the updates
+   from the remote branch, rebase your change onto it, and resolve the conflicts
+   before doing the force-push
+
+   .. code-block:: bash
+
+      $ git pull --rebase origin target-branch
+
+   So that the pull request does not contain any "merge" commit. Instead of "merging"
+   the target branch, we expect a linear history in a pull request where you
+   commit on top of the remote branch.
+
    Q: Which branch should I target in my pull request?
 
    A: The target branch depends on the nature of your change: