Subject: Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

From: Richard CURNOW <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:51:53 +0000

* Shawn Pearce <[email-masked]> [2006-11-15]:
> 
> So what about making git-merge take a -m "msg" argument to supply
> the commit message, in which case it does the current behavior
> (and thus git-pull needs to change to supply -m); and then make
> git-merge without any -m parameter invoke "git pull . $@" ?

Sounds good to me.

When I'm merging in my own projects, I currently always use merge
(possibly preceded by fetch) rather than pull.  Why?  Because I don't
want my history full of commit messages like

Merge branch "trial_hack" from "../scratch_dir_with_silly_name"

In contrast to Linus's case of wanting to record where the remote merge
came from, I expressly don't want to record that - I want the merge
commit to describe conceptually what was being merged with what.

OK, I could use probably use pull with --no-commit, but I've already
trained my fingers to type out the merge syntax.  They'd be happier with
'git merge -m "Merge feature foo with fixes for bar" bar" though.