Brown, Len>Len, how old a git are you using? "git-merge" really should >_never_ have done this, but old (and I mean really old) >git merges sometimes got confused with the base parent >and would create a merge even when it was unnecessary.
should be the top of tree on the day the merge was made.
I generally pull from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git at the beginning of the day, build it and install it.
Right now git --version answers 0.99.9.GIT
-Len