Re: [RFC/PATCH] Fast forward strategies allow, never, and only

From: Lars Hjemli <lh@elementstorage.no>
Date: Mar 11, 2008, 10:09 UTC
Message-ID: <8c5c35580803110309q2474c42q4758d618fca3cea@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080311093553.23191.qmail@science.horizon.com>

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 10:35 AM,  <colin@horizon.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> > What's lacking is "why this is a good idea".
>
>  Seconded.  A long time ago (and I'm too lazy to find a link), Linus
>  explained why disabling fast-forward merges was almost always a Bad Idea,
>  and nobody has come up with a good reason why you'd want one since.

The reason for --no-ff was twofold:
* theoretical: when you want to record the integration of a topic branch
* practical: when merging git-svn branches in git, git-svn dcommit
would update the wrong svn 'branch' if the merge was a fast-forward

I originally needed --no-ff due to the 'practical' aspects (I used git-svn when working with the day-job svn repository), but now that we've switched to git (Hurray!) I'm still using --no-ff for the 'theoretical' reason: our topic branches tend to be named after bugtracker tickets, so by recording the merge of such a branch we get a very explicit note in our git log about when each ticket was resolved.

YMMV.

-- larsh