reading, in various places, people asking how to globally set options for merging, to which the standard answer is, no, you can't do that *globally*, but you can do it on a per-branch basis with branch.<branchname>.mergeOptions the most common example being to squash into master: git config branch.master.mergeOptions "--squash" however, i read in "man git-config": merge.ff By default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that is a descendant of the current commit. Instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded. When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line). When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line). where (based on a quick test i tried and, hopefully, did not screw up), the per-branch mergeOptions value for fast-forwarding takes precedence over the global merge.ff value. this is the only merge option i've noticed that has a global settings as well as per-branch setting. is it worth putting in an extra line or two mentioning this in the man page? that is, as long as i've understood this correctly. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca/dokuwiki Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================