Re: git merge vs git commit

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 9, 2008, 19:11 UTC
Message-ID: <7vd4jd6snt.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080909185418.GI4829@genesis.frugalware.org>

Miklos Vajna <vmiklos@frugalware.org> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 10:34:42AM -0700, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> I think some changes went into 1.6.0 around this area to (r)eject parents
>> that are redundant.
>
> Yes, it was your 98cf9c3 (Introduce reduce_heads(), 2008-06-27).

That does not necessarily mean git-merge (or git-merge-octopus) uses that C function when coming up with the set of commits to record as parents.

As to what the correct behaviour is, I personally do not have a strong preference either way.

 - If you specify a fast-foward on the command line to merge into your
   HEAD, that is your choice and you may deserve the extra parent, even if
   it is redundant.

 - On the other hand, if you try to merge a single fast-forward, we do not
   even create a merge commit, so in the same spirit it may be better if
   we dropped the original HEAD from the merged result (i.e. Russell's
   "cleanly merged" case).

I dunno.