To add to other answers of why you don't use rebase to merge feature-a branch to master (so master have feature-a changes without needing to merge): you shouldn't use rebase on a shared remote repository. Doing so will create merge conflicts when other collaborators try to pull (because when you rebase, it creates different hashes for the same commits, which Git identified as conflicts). Therefore a merge here is necessary after rebase. Don't use rebase + rebase (on shared repositories).