From: Lars Hjemli Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:09:22 GMT Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH] Fast forward strategies allow, never, and only Message-ID: <8c5c35580803110309q2474c42q4758d618fca3cea@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20080311093553.23191.qmail@science.horizon.com> On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 10:35 AM, wrote: > > 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