On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 3:10 PM Konstantin Tokarev <annulen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In reality, newbies often end up doing chaotic merges caused by pull > instead of learning about rebase and branches. IMO, it would be better > to have pull.ff=only as a default. You and Junio make a really good point. After reading the responses, I definitely could reword my problem statement. The problem is that, for newbie git users (the majority of people I work with), they just do `git pull` which always does a merge. Myself (and many others) in simple workflows don't like it when newbies do merges on a pull. So the problem statement is: Prevent newbies from doing a merge commit on pull. Whether its a rebase or not is beside the point. I think making it --ff-only would solve the issue nicely. It forces them to make their intention explicit: Ether do a merge pull, or a rebase pull. But you are forcing them to pick (and ultimately get educated).