From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [GIT] Networking Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:01:54 -0800 Message-ID: References: <20110310.153444.115930379.davem@davemloft.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Cc: akpm@linux-foundation.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: David Miller Return-path: Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:46881 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754004Ab1CKACo (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:02:44 -0500 In-Reply-To: Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Now, I admit that it's a git usability bug: for normal "git commit", > git will _force_ you to write a message, and sadly, for merges, I made > it instead just do the message automatically. My bad. I designed it > for the kind of merges I do, where the the automatic merge message > actually tells you what the merge is all about. Btw, the reason I got really upset this time (and I've let it slide before), is that this time your back-merge not only had that totally useless merge message (that's happened before), but *because* you did that back-merge, it also ends up making _my_ merge message totally useless - the one that normally contains good and useful information (a valid source of merging, and the abbreviated shortlog of what was merged). Why? Because you had done the back-merge very recently, my pull request then ends up being a fast-forward, so your _useless_ merge message basically entirely replaces the one that would have been useful. Yes, I could do it with "git pull --no-ff", but I have to admit to hating adding more artificial merges into the tree just to get the merge information. I didn't think the "--no-ff" flag was a good idea, and I've never used it so far, but I have to say that now I'm wavering. I probably also should just talk to Junio and tell him that the whole "totally automatic merge messages" was another horrible design mistake. But if we do fix that in git, I suspect it will (a) break scripts that expected the automatic silent merge and (b) take a long time to percolate to people. So it might be one of those "we have to live with it due to backwards compatibility reasons". Ugh. Linus