Forcing --no-ff on pull

While I'm in the email writing mood tonight, I figured I'd ask this question.

We've recently moved a giant tree with a number of developers over to Git from Subversion. One of the biggest stumbling points we have right now is the concept of a "fast-forward", insofar that it's "screwed" us a couple times (see: people not RTFM'ing then crying that Git is broken because they cannot RTFM ;))

The most common use-case involves a user merging a project branch into a stabilization branch (`git checkout stable && git pull . project`) in such a way that no merge commit is generated. Of course, without thinking they'll push these changes up to the centralized repository. Not 15 minutes later they realize "ruh roh! I didn't want to do that" and become very frustrated that they have to resort to asking for help or hand-reverting N number of commits.

Is there a header macro I can define or a config option I could define to make --no-ff on `git pull` implicit instead of explicit? Making sure we are always generating merge commits as a "just-in-case" safe guard about merge-happy developers who think after hitting enter? :)

Cheers