Re: Cease and desist for companies and government agencies misusing git

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 30, 2025, 19:50 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq1pmk5fts.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <CADanQgA3h52hax-mdSTBV-tNDGvNRSxLU217aVygj7Cs7Lu8Bg@mail.gmail.com>

Mark Bauermeister <warfan2007@gmail.com> writes:

> Is it time for an online campaign ala "Merge commits considered harmful"?
>
> I have nothing against a merge commit being the result of a successful
> PR but people spamming merge commits are ... something else.

There do exist people who make pointless back-merges into their topic from the trunk, just like there are those who pointlessly rebase their topic every time they notice that the trunk got updated. Both are bad, even though constant rebasing would hide the fact they were rebased and what was integrated at the end was less well tested than what was originally written, so in a sense it may be worse.

These people need to learn that they can make trial merges every once in a while so that their topic can be used with more recent tip of trunk than where they forked from, and that they do not have to keep these trial merges in the history.