[Nix-dev] About merge vs non-merge

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 09/02/2014 05:51 PM, Luca Bruno wrote:
> Somebody does not like merges because it makes the history "less clean".
> However, just today, I encountered a case where the merge was needed for
> a revert.
> 
> The good thing about the green merge button is that:
> 1) It retains a message about the PR. So you have information if you
> need to do a revert.
> 2) If it's a multi-commit PR, you may need to revert multiple commits.
> Without merge this information is lost.
> 
> For manual merges, yes it's very inconvenient. In theory one should either:
> 1) Edit every commit message saying that it was part of a given PR
> 2) or create a local branch mirroring the requester branch
> In both cases it's annoying.
> 
> However for anti-merge people, it may make the history less clean for
> you, but the lose of information is not worth it in my opinion. So I
> please everyone, if you can choose to have a merge commit, please keep it.
> 
> Best regards,
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
> 

There is no anti-merge sentiment, there's a ‘don't have 1:1 commit to
merge message ratio’. If it's a multi-commit PR that shouldn't be
squashed into one, sure, keep your merge message. If it's a single
commit PR, in 95% of cases the merge message is just noise.

If you're after the PR for a commit without merge message, simply put in
the author's name on the PR page with is:pr filter.

I don't want to hide merge messages because they *can* be useful as you
say, the problem is that there number of actually useful merge messages
is small, not to mention they are hidden behind all the green-button merges.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this thread is. Is it to incite people
to use the green button? Is it to ask them to manually merge smarter?

-- 
Mateusz K.