On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 4:09 AM David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Here's a set of patches for AFS. The first three are trivial, deleting > unused symbols and rolling out a wrapper function. Pulled. However, I was close to unpulling it again. It has a merge commit with this merge message: Merge remote-tracking branch 'net/master' into afs-next and that simply is not acceptable. Commit messages need to explain the commit. The same is even more true of merges! In a regular commit, you can at least look at the patch and say "ok, that change is obvious and self-explanatory". In a merge commit, the _only_ explanation you have is basically the commit message, and when the commit message is garbage, the merge is garbage. If you can't explain why you are doing a merge, then you shouldn't do the merge. It's that simple. And if you can't be bothered to write the explanation down, I'm not sure I can be bothered to then pull the end result. Linus