On Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:18:40 -0800, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Traditionally, a cleanly resolved merge was committed by "git merge" using
> the auto-generated merge commit log message with invoking the editor.
>
> After 5 years of use in the field, it turns out that people perform too
> many unjustified merges of the upstream history into their topic branches.
> These merges are not just useless, but they are often not explained well,
> and making the end result unreadable when it gets time for merging their
> history back to their upstream.
Ok, so I'm late to the party and perhaps I missed the discussion about
this, but...
I think the proposed commit message should have a comment, just like for
an ordinary commit, that explains why we are showing the user an editor.
(I'm too lazy to check, but I suspect we *always* give a comment about
what is going on when we fire up an editor.)
I would suggest something like
# Please enter the commit message for your merge commit. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
or if you feel comfortable with educating the user in a
workflow-specific way, even
# Please enter the commit message for your merge commit. You should
# justify it especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic
# branch.
#
# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts
# the commit.
--
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch
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