Re: If merging that is really fast forwarding creates new commit [Was: Re: how to show log for only one branch]

["Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>]

On 11/6/06, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Liu Yubao wrote:
> > Then, what bad *logical* problem will happen if a merging that is really a
> > fast forwarding creates a new commit?
> You MUST NOT do that.
>
> If a fast-forward were to do a "merge commit", you'd never get into the
> situation where two people merging each other would really ever get a
> stable result. They'd just keep doing merge commits on top of each other.

Indeed. I used Arch for quite a while and if you were merging between
2 or more repos it would never reach a stable point even if the code
didn't change at all.

If a group of 3 developers (with one repor per developer) was
developing at a slow pace (say, a daily commit each, plus a couple of
pull/updates per day) the garbage-commit to content-commit ratio was
awful. If on a given day noone had made a single commit, we'd still
have a whole set of useless updates merged and committed.

> Besides, doing an empty commit like that ("I fast forwarded") literally
> doesn't add any true history information.

And as the number of developers and repos grows in a distributed
scenarios, fast-forwards increasingly outnumber real commits. The
usefulness of your logs sinks to the sewers.

cheers,