In this article, the author explains rebasing with this diagram:
Rebase: If you have not yet published your
branch, or have clearly communicated
that others should not base their work
on it, you have an alternative. You
can rebase your branch, where instead
of merging, your commit is replaced by
another commit with a different
parent, and your branch is moved
there.
while a normal merge would have looked like this:
So, if you rebase, you are just losing a history state (which would be garbage collected sometime in the future). So, why would someone want to do a rebase at all? What am I missing here?