Re: State of the repository conversion

[David Caldwell]

On 3/21/14, 11:35 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:02:53 +0100
>>
>>> In some ancient discussion Linus said that a commit that doesn't bring
>>> in any diffs is "madness" and shouldn't exist.  Or maybe I
>>> misunderstood.
>>
>> You probably misunderstood.
> 
> Quite likely.  But maybe you will be kind enough to explain what Linus
> meant in these two messages, when he said that an extra merge-commit
> is wrong and has "zero semantic information in it"?
> 
>   https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2006q4/018265.html
>   https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2006q4/018273.html

He's saying that in the context of tracking a remote branch. He's saying
that if I'm pulling from your repo and I haven't made any changes, then
it's pretty rude of me to add random empty merges which only signify
when I happened to run the "pull" command. What I really want it to just
collect your changes and add them to my repo, using fast-forward merges
to move my branch to the latest commits.

In particular, I don't believe he is saying anything about merging
across release/master/feature branches. In fact, I've seen many people
advocate "git merge --no-ff" when merging important branches together.

-David

smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature