Comments on: Avoiding Merge Commits in Git

By: Jonathan Lister

Jonathan Lister — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:26:40 +0000

Kerry, thanks for the detailed exploration. It’s probably my newbieness with git, but I like having the merges in my history – it’s a good reminder of what people have been doing…)

By: FND

FND — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:38:21 +0000

After an enlightening (and patient) explanation from Kerry, I’m starting to see the error of my ways:
One of my major concerns was that I wanted to preserve my branches’ detailed commit messages.
However, I’ve realized that’s nonsense; if the commits in the master are less meaningful than more fine-grained ones in the respective branch, then you’re simply Doing It Wrong…

Nevertheless, it’s still a bit strange that I can’t just keep merging stuff into the master without updating (whether with merge or rebase) the respective branch first:

git checkout MyBranch
git commit -a -m “foo”
git commit -a -m “bar”
git checkout master
git merge –squash MyBranch
git commit -a -m “foobar”
git svn dcommit
git checkout MyBranch
git [merge|rebase] master
GOTO #2

By: FND

FND — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:42:48 +0000

I’m very wary of rebase – though that’s probably due to ignorance.
As discussed on my blog, I’ve had some issues with using rebase. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but ended up using merge – and never had a problem since.
Maybe it’s time for another Kerry Teaches Git session at Osmosoft Towers!? (Worst case, I’ll wait for the next BarCamp… )