What's your mental model for a Git commit, and a Git branch?

Once I properly learned those two concepts, understanding rebases became a lot easier.

I'll try to explain it to the best of my abilities.

• Think of a commit being a patch - a description of how to take a particular file from one state to another
• A branch is a list of patches to be applied in order, from the point where the branch was created until the last commit on the branch

When you rebase a particular branch, what you're essentially doing is taking all of the commits that are currently on your branch, checking out the other branch, and then applying each of the patches in order on that new branch.

A rebase can be cleanly applied if the premise for each commit has not changed when applied, but if the premise has changed, you get a conflict to be resolved before being able to continue the rebase.

I mentally model a rebase a bit as a fast version of how it would look like to build the branch I was on, but on top of the branch I'm rebasing on.