Rebasing a core repo in git

I have a customized fork of CodeIgniter that I use as a standard baseline for several projects. Recently, I've made significant improvements in this repo that I want to use to update the client projects that use it. What I can't seem to figure out is how to pull in the changes to a client project.

So I have:

Baseline:
A--B--C--D--E

Client cloned @ C
C'--D'--E'

And I want to update the client repo to E from the Baseline project.

I've tried rebase, and it has erased the files not present in the baseline project (views and such), and creates a bunch of conflicts that really don't ne开发者_JAVA技巧ed to be conflicts with things like the default HTML5 boilerplate that I use.

Is there an option for rebase that I should be using? Is there a different way to approach it? Do I need a bunch of .gitignores for the content directories?

You should probably start looking into merging instead of rebasing.

First of all, you should think in terms of branches, instead of repos. A fork is just a branch derived from another branch. The two have an ancestor in common (a commit) and that's what allows you to do all the nice git magic.

If i understand correctly your situation is more like

(origin/master)
A--B--C--D--E
      \
       \
        \F--G
        (local/master)

and you want to have commits D--E in your local branch, amirite?

Then you either have to git rebase origin/master, or git merge origin/master.

Think of it graphically and it'll be a lot easier.

And yes, you should most definitely read some more about git's branching model :)