Re: [RFC/PATCH] Fast forward strategies allow, never, and only

["Lars Hjemli" <lh@elementstorage.no>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 10:35 AM,  <colin@horizon.com> wrote:
> > What's lacking is "why this is a good idea".
>
>  Seconded.  A long time ago (and I'm too lazy to find a link), Linus
>  explained why disabling fast-forward merges was almost always a Bad Idea,
>  and nobody has come up with a good reason why you'd want one since.

The reason for --no-ff was twofold:
* theoretical: when you want to record the integration of a topic branch
* practical: when merging git-svn branches in git, git-svn dcommit
would update the wrong svn 'branch' if the merge was a fast-forward

I originally needed --no-ff due to the 'practical' aspects (I used
git-svn when working with the day-job svn repository), but now that
we've switched to git (Hurray!) I'm still using --no-ff for the
'theoretical' reason: our topic branches tend to be named after
bugtracker tickets, so by recording the merge of such a branch we get
a very explicit note in our git log about when each ticket was
resolved.

YMMV.

--
larsh