Ok, here is an update. I wonder how we should keep track of the "proposal" series, though. Sending the full-text replacement like I am doing here feels eh not gittish. Perhaps I should start a new directory in todo branch (say, 1.8.0), accept patches from people? I'd grudgingly admit that using Wiki on k.org may be less burdensome (I hate editing inside the browser myself), but I'd want to keep the mailing list the center of discussion and am afraid that forcing people to go to Wiki would fragment the discussion. I dunno. -- Proposal: Currently "git merge" without saying what to merge fails loudly. As many downstream developers (that are by definition more numerous than people who do not have "upstream") run merge from the configured upstream of the current branch most of the time, it would make it more convenient for them to change the default to merge from the upstream of the current branch. Running "git merge" without argument, when there is no upstream defined for the current branch, will be an error. Risks: Existing scripts may prepare what to merge in an array (e.g. in Bourne, accumulating them in "$@" by repeatedly doing 'set "$@" "$newbranch"') and call 'git merge "$@"', relying on the current behaviour that zero argument will flag an error condition. Such scripts will be broken by this change. Driving "git merge" with xargs without --no-run-if-empty (not POSIX), feeding the branches to merge in an Octopus, will be broken the same way. Migration plan: Add merge.defaultToUpstream configuration variable, which defaults to false when unconfigured. Change "git merge" so that when this variable is set and the command is run without the commit to merge to use the configured upstream of the current branch (or error out if there isn't one). Merge this change in the next 1.7.x series. Update the error message issued when when "git merge" is run without the commit to merge and this configuration variable is not explicitly set either way to notify the user of upcoming incompatibility. In 1.8.0, flip the default for merge.defaultUpstream to true. Helped-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html