Subject: Re: If merging that is really fast forwarding creates new commit [Was: Re: how to show log for only one branch]

From: Eran Tromer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 13:46:34 +0200

Hi Linus,

On 2006-11-06 19:48, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> Besides, doing an empty commit like that ("I fast forwarded") literally 
>> doesn't add any true history information. It literally views history not 
>> as history of the _project_, but as the history of just one of the 
>> repositories. And that's wrong.
> 
> Btw, absolutely the _only_ reason people seem to want to do this is 
> because they want to "pee in the snow" and put their mark on things. They 
> seem to want to show "_I_ did this", even if the "doing" was a total 
> no-op and they didn't actually generate any real value.

In a project that uses topic branches extensively, the merge-induced
commits give a useful cue about the logical grouping of patches. They
let you easily glean the coarse-grained history and independent lines of
work ("pickaxe made it to next", "Linus got the libata updates") without
getting bogged down by individual commits, just by looking at the gitk
graph. Fast-forwards lose this information, and the more you encourage
them, the less grokkable history becomes.

Empty commits may be the wrong tool to address this (for all the reasons
you gave), but there's certainly useful process information that's
currently being lost.