From: Martin Langhoff Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:03:21 GMT Subject: Re: If merging that is really fast forwarding creates new commit [Was: Re: how to show log for only one branch] Message-ID: <46a038f90611060803o653b5b8cx44d3adcfda699ec5@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: On 11/6/06, Linus Torvalds 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,