Re: merge summaries

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 18, 2007, 18:33 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0705181130580.3890@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <25A3C618-8D12-42A8-9478-D3A4E7633CE7@zib.de>

On Fri, 18 May 2007, Steffen Prohaska wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> It took me some time to figure out how to get summaries of the merged branch
> into merge messages. Finally I recognized that I simply need to set
> 
> 	git-config merge.summary true

Yes.

> I have two questions:
> 1) Why isn't 'true' the default setting? The two probably most prominent git
> repositories, git and kernel, both use merge summaries.

Think about _who_ uses it for those two prominent repositories for a while.

[ pause, ponder here ]

In other words, "merge.summary" should be true ONLY FOR TOP-LEVEL MAINTAINERS.

Making it true for anybody else is almost always a bug. Yes, I and Junio have it enabled, but pretty much nobody else should, because if they pull from me or Junio in order to merge, their merge summaries would be exactly the wrong way around!

> 2) Why does git-merge have a switch '--no-summary' to switch summaries off,
> but doesn't have a switch '--summary' to switch them on?

Probably because "normal users" should never use summaries in the first place, so it's just not been an issue.

		Linus