Hi folks, I've had a couple of users recently be bitten by "git rebase"'s default handling of merge commits: * One user had selected the "git config pull.rebase true" option from the "Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches" pull conflict hint text, without understanding enough about what that meant: that if they do a "pull" right after having done a (non-ff) "merge", their commit history would get mangled with a set of duplicated commits. * The other was using a GUI (Intellij IDEA), which offered to rebase when there was a push conflict, but didn't mention or do anything special about the fact that the single commit to be rebased on a push conflict was a merge commit (same consequences) In terms of "quick wins" to help these users avoid the trap they fell into, I can think of two "quick wins": 1. Change the "Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches" pull conflict hint text to offer "git config pull.rebase merges" instead of "git config pull.rebase true" 2. Offer a global "--rebase-merges by default" config option (I know there is already a per-branch option, but that's really not very effective when people are creating new branches all the time) I've scanned the archives of the last year or two and can't find any chatter or activity around this - does anyone have an opinion regarding either of these approaches? Ideally I'd like to do both. The hint change for people who follow the hint without understanding the dangers, and the global config option for people who understand this historical weirdness of rebase and would rather see the back of it, now that "--rebase-merges" exists and improves rebase behavior for most users under most circumstances. Presumably with such a global config option we would also need a "--no-rebase-merges" option to counter its effect on-demand? As I think about it, the global option sounds like it might be hard to prove the correctness of (and compatibility with the hosts of other options), so I probably won't be qualified to do this. Is there any objection to the simple hint change, at least? Thanks, Tao
