Re: [RFC/PATCH] git-merge: implement --ff-only-merge option.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 7, 2014, 21:38 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwq8bd0hw.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <87a957obm6.fsf@osv.gnss.ru>

Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com> writes:

>> Because rebasing immediately before is considered a bad manner,
>> i.e. encouraging a wrong workflow?
>
> Why? What is wrong about it?

Searching the kernel archive for messages that talks about "rebase" and "pull-request" from Linus would tell us why it is frowned upon in a prominent early adopter project of Git.

You destroy what you have been testing and replace it with an untested one. If you merge, and if the result of the merge is broken, at least you would have something that used to work at its second parent (i.e. the tip of your topic).

> Please also notice that I don't try to impose this on anybody who does
> consider it wrong workflow.

I know ;-).  I didn't say anything about "imposing", did I?

Having an option to make it easy to do something undesirable gives people an excuse to say "See Git has this option to let me do that easily, it is an officially sanctioned and encouraged workflow".