Re: git merge and merge message

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

On 3/12/07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> The "don't merge, just fast-forward" is the right thing to do for working
> together. However, I can well imagine that if you actually work with
> branches not as "distributed development", but *just* as "topic branches",
> then having the "useless" merge (with the parents actually being parents
> of each other) migth actually be nice from a documentation standpoint.

Well, actually I do quite a bit of work in private repos, and it is
more useful to know *trivially* that the branches are in the same
place, and get me and my team into the "it's about the content,
stupid" mindset.

So after all the flamefesting, I drank the content-is-king koolaid and
if a pull leads to a fast-forward, I'm happy. If it's a pointless
merge I often rebase to linearise.

> I'm torn on this.

Man, you're getting soft in the middle ;-) First, git gets a newline
conversion option to please windows users that don't use the many GOOD
programming editors that know a unix newline from a UFO (and those are
the majority these days, or so I hear). And now _this_! Tsk, tsk!

> I really dislike anything but fast-forward, because I
> have a strong suspicion that it will cause "alpha male" behaviour (where
> maintainers use the "useless merge" as a way to mark their territory),
> which I think is actually really bad form.

I share your concern. And for Xavier's case ref logs should do the
trick anyway.

cheers,


m