Re: [GIT] Networking

Linus Torvalds
2011-03-11T00:02:47Z

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> Now, I admit that it's a git usability bug: for normal "git commit",
> git will _force_ you to write a message, and sadly, for merges, I made
> it instead just do the message automatically. My bad. I designed it
> for the kind of merges I do, where the the automatic merge message
> actually tells you what the merge is all about.

Btw, the reason I got really upset this time (and I've let it slide
before), is that this time your back-merge not only had that totally
useless merge message (that's happened before), but *because* you did
that back-merge, it also ends up making _my_ merge message totally
useless - the one that normally contains good and useful information
(a valid source of merging, and the abbreviated shortlog of what was
merged).

Why? Because you had done the back-merge very recently, my pull
request then ends up being a fast-forward, so your _useless_ merge
message basically entirely replaces the one that would have been
useful.

Yes, I could do it with "git pull --no-ff", but I have to admit to
hating adding more artificial merges into the tree just to get the
merge information. I didn't think the "--no-ff" flag was a good idea,
and I've never used it so far, but I have to say that now I'm
wavering.

I probably also should just talk to Junio and tell him that the whole
"totally automatic merge messages" was another horrible design
mistake. But if we do fix that in git, I suspect it will (a) break
scripts that expected the automatic silent merge and (b) take a long
time to percolate to people. So it might be one of those "we have to
live with it due to backwards compatibility reasons". Ugh.

Linus