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

Paul Smith· Nov 26, 2014, 19:42 UTC · lore

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?

Junio C Hamano· Nov 26, 2014, 21:32 UTC · re: Paul Smith · lore

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

Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net> writes:

Show 29 quoted lines

> 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?

Offhand I do not think of any, but I do not use --ff-only or quash merge myself very often. If I have to guess, this is merely an implementation glitch where whoever did "merge --squash" did not think its interaction with --ff-only through (if --ff-only came first) or whoever did "merge.ff = only" support did not think its interaction with "merge --squash" through (if things happened in the other order).