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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 7, 2014, 18:37 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzjd7enet.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <1412699710-3480-1-git-send-email-sorganov@gmail.com>

Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> This option allows to create merge commit when fast-forward is
> possible, and abort otherwise. I.e. it's equivalent to --ff-only,
> except that it finally creates merge commit instead of
> fast-forwarding.
>
> One may also consider this option to be equivalent to --no-ff with
> additional check that the command without --no-ff  would indeed result
> in fast-forward.
>
> Useful to incorporate topic branch as single merge commit, ensuring
> the left-side of the merge has no changes (our-diff-empty-merge).
>
> Signed-off-by: Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com>
> ---

The workflow this implements sounds like "because we can", not "because it will help us do X and Y and Z". Why would it be useful to limit the history to a shape where all merges are the ones that could have been fast-forwarded?

I cannot justify that sensibly myself, which in turn makes the feature smell to me that it is encouraging a wrong workflow.