git – confusion over terminology, “theirs” vs “mine”

ours and theirs is a somewhat confusing concept; exacerbated when performing a rebase:

When performing a merge, ours refers to the branch you’re merging into, and theirs refers to the branch you are merging from. So if you are trying to resolve conflicts in the middle of a merge:

• use ours to accept changes from the branch we are currently on
• use theirs to accept changes from the branch we are merging into.

That makes sense, right?

When rebasing, ours and theirs are inverted. Rebases pick files into a “detached” HEAD branch. The target is that HEAD branch, and merge-from is the original branch before rebase. That makes:

• --ours the anonymous one the rebase is constructing, and
• --theirs the one being rebased;

I.e., rebasing replays the current branch’s commits (one at a time) on top of the branch that we intend to rebase with.