On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Robert Newson <[email protected]> wrote: > > If we enhance the #1 proposal to include a final rebase against master > before merge, then master will be truly linear. That will make for > easier reading, easier backporting and will enable bisecting when > spelunking for regressions, etc.
I disagree. git-bisect is smart enough to remove whole merges before diving into their constituent commits, IIRC, which reduces the possibility of false negatives if there were intermediate commits that had failing tests on the feature branch but the ultimate merge was clean and green. I'm not sure where this notion that bisecting with merge commits is harder comes from. Similarly, backporting a topic branch should look something like: > git checkout -b topic-branch-1.3.x-backport topic-branch > git rebase --onto 1.3.x master This would produce a branch (topic-branch-1.3.x-backport) which contains all the commits on topic-branch since it diverged from master, rebased onto 1.3.x. Reading history with merge commits can also be easier than the alternative FF-only history since there is a --merges option to git-log. This feature can, for instance, show you time line of topic introduction without the clutter of the individual commits that were necessary to produce them. If I am going to argue one way or another I would actually suggest that feature or topic branches always merge with --no-ff.
