Preventing merges from one branch into others

[tried IRC to no avail] I've been trying to find a way to prevent myself from merging a client-specific branch back into my dev/master branches. Is there an easy/straightforward way to do this (perhaps via a hook)? I didn't see any sort of "pre-merge" hook script. Visualized:

  A -> B -> C [dev]
   \
    -> Q -> R -> S [customer-specific]

and I want to ensure that changes Q/R/S never find their way back into dev.

So I was hoping some sort of "hey, you're an idiot for trying to merge $CUSTOMER_BRANCH back into dev/master" warning. :-)

-tkc

Tim Chase <git@tim.thechases.com> writes:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94111/focus=71069

I think yours is a canonical example of "I do not want to run command X when these conditions hold", when "these conditions" can be checked locally _before_ you decide to do X.

While it is theoretically possible to give X a pre-X hook in such a case, we do not want it to be the first choice to avoid hook bloat.