Re: [PATCH] git-merge: add option --no-ff

From: Lars Hjemli <hjemli@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 18, 2007, 14:01 UTC
Message-ID: <8c5c35580709180701m54810d80nefa4704abb8797dd@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <46EFD0F8.5050603@vilain.net>

On 9/18/07, Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Lars Hjemli wrote:
> > On 9/18/07, Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net> wrote:
> >> If you really want one, use git commit-tree directly.
> >>
> > Yeah, that's an option, but --no-ff is somewhat less work ;-)
> >
>
> Sure.  I just don't see a good use case for it from this yet.

Ok. I'll try to explain why I needed --no-ff in the first place:

I have two git-svn brances, lets call them FEATURE and RELEASE. At one
point, I did
  $ git checkout FEATURE
  $ git merge RELEASE
  $ git svn dcommit

Now, my coworkers can continue testing/developing on top of the subversion branch FEATURE (I'm currently the only git user), knowing that every bugfix from RELEASE have been merged.

A few days later, FEATURE is completed and tested and should be integrated in RELEASE. I did

  $ git checkout RELEASE
  $ git merge FEATURE
  $ git svn dcommit -n

and noticed that git-svn wanted to commit the result to FEATURE, since the merge actually was a fast-forward. If this was a a pure git environment it would be no problem, but as I needed to get a merge revision on top of the subversion RELEASE branch, I was in trouble.

My options:
* rebase FEATURE onto RELEASE: this would have duplicated ~150
revisions from FEATURE onto RELEASE in subversion
* merge --squash: this would have created the wanted history in
subversion, but my git history would have lacked the info that
everything in FEATURE had been integrated into RELEASE (this could
have been fixed by editing the grafts file)
* merge --no-ff: this made both the subversion history and my local
git history reflect what actually happened.

So I went for the --no-ff option.

If this use-case isn't good enough, oh well. I can always carry the patch forward in my git repo ;-)

-- larsh