Linus TorvaldsI personally prefer "ignore_merges" to be on by default, because quite often the merge diff is distracting and not interesting. That's true both with "-p" and with "--stat" output.
If you want output from merges, you can trivially use the "-m", "-c" or "--cc" flags to tell that you're interested in merges, which also tells the diff generator what kind of diff to do (for --stat, any of the three will do, of course, but they differ for plain patches or for --patch-with-stat).
This trivial patch just removes the two lines that tells "git log" not to ignore merges. It will still show the commit log message, of course, due to the "always_show_header" part.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> ---
diff --git a/git.c b/git.c index 0be14bb..40b7e42 100644 --- a/git.c +++ b/git.c @@ -331,8 +331,6 @@ static int cmd_log(int argc, const char init_revisions(&rev); rev.always_show_header = 1; rev.diffopt.recursive = 1; - rev.combine_merges = 1; - rev.ignore_merges = 0; return cmd_log_wc(argc, argv, envp, &rev); }