Quick survey of git "merge commits" in open source projects about blog

[cdman]

IMHO it is really unfortunate that GitHub doesn't support the rebase / fast-forward merge workflow from the UI :-(. These merge commits don't provide any useful information and are just noise in the history.

[lukego]

@cdman do the merge commits tell us anything interesting about the way each project is developed?

[vy]

Interesting list @lukego. I also wonder the same question: What do the merge commits really tell us?

[lukego]

@vy: I'll interpret one:

The LuaJIT merge commits tell us that upstream is maintaining two branches in parallel: the stable master branch and the development v2.1 branch. Bug fixes are committed to the master branch and then merged onto the v2.1 branch so that they land in both places. Features are committed to the v2.1 branch only and are not merged back onto the stable branch.

This workflow is supported by git merge because it makes sure that each commit on the master branch is applied to the v2.1 branch exactly once.

Somebody else's turn to interpret the next one :)

[lheckemann]

Some further reading on linux merge commits…