> I've never tried "git log -p --merge". I'll try it next time. This
> is certainly not common knowledge, however. (But to save Dscho the
> trouble: git usability in general is not the subject of this thread.)
>
>> > Even if you have a repo with widespread push access, git's log looks
>> > annoying compared to svn because of all the merge commits. That's a
>> > primary reason why rebase was invented, of course.
>>
>> Please don't talk nonsense if you do not know history. I invented rebase
>> primarily because I wanted to help e-mail based contributors. There is
>> nothing about merge avoidance to it.
>
> Sorry, I mixed up git-rerere and git-rebase. From git-rerere's man page:
>
> When your topic branch is long-lived, however, your topic branch would
> end up having many such "Merge from master" commits on it, which would
> unnecessarily clutter the development history. Readers of the Linux
> kernel mailing list may remember that Linus complained about such too
> frequent test merges when a subsystem maintainer asked to pull from a
> branch full of "useless merges".
>
> Nowadays, I'm pretty sure people use git-rebase to avoid this sort of
> problem (or "git pull --rebase" presumably wouldn't have appeared),
> but I can now see how git-rebase was not written *for* this problem.
>
> Anyway, my point was that git-rebase (or at least git-rerere and
> git-reset) are needed if you want to avoid a lot of merge commits.
> And, to relate it back to this thread, git-rebase cannot possibly be
> understood without understanding git internals, and git internals are
> easiest to understand by learning the plumbing.
>
> svn avoids these excess merges by default, albeit because it puts your
> working copy at risk every time you do "svn update".
>
>> You can skip merges with "git log --no-merges", just in case you didn't
>> know.
>
> Perhaps this is mostly a user education or documentation issue. I
> know about --no-merges, but it's unclear that this is really a safe
> thing to use, particularly if some of your merges have conflicts.
> Leaving them out leaves out an important part of history. Do you use
> this option yourself?
>
> Have fun,
>
> Avery
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