Re: Why does git merge --squash fail when merge.ff is set to only?

> In our development process we always want to do rebase and only rarely
> create merge commits, and so we have a recommendation to set the
> merge.ff configuration attribute to "only".
>
> This is great, however it appears to break git merge --squash (which we
> also use constantly).
>
> If I'm squash-merging from a branch which is not based on HEAD (cannot
> use fast-forwarding) then I get the extremely cryptic error:
>
>   $ git checkout master
>   $ git pull
>   $ git merge --squash my-branch
>   fatal: Not possible to fast-forward, aborting.
>
> I couldn't even understand what this error meant for a while: what was
> being fast-forwarded here anyway?  It took me a lot of thought to
> realize it was related to the merge.ff config setting.
>
> Eventually I figured it out, and now have this workaround:
>
>   $ git merge --ff --squash my-branch
>
> But, shouldn't we consider this a bug?  I don't see any reason why
> --squash should pay attention to the ff config setting, or command line
> flags either for that matter.  IMHO when you add the --squash flag, the
> ff options/config should be ignored.
>
> Or, am I missing some subtle issue here?