[Mono-dev] The new world of Git -- what else can we change :-)

[Avery Pennarun]

>> I've personally found this workflow to be a lot of extra work for
>> little gain, and certainly:
>
> We've already seen issues with unintended (but safe) merges causing
> confusion -- the confusion is exacerbated by the GitHub UI showing 'git
> diff --first-parent' on merge commits, rather than something more symmetric.

I actually work around such problems in the opposite way you're
describing: whenever merging a big branch into the trunk, I always use
--no-ff.  This prevents people from accidentally flipping which commit
is the "main" one if you're going to use --first-parent on master.

However, it's just so easy to do this:

    git checkout master
      # do stuff
    git commit -a
    git pull
    git push

That I think asking people to do fancier stuff is kind of cruel most
of the time.

If you wanted to really get fancy, you would have a single mainline
mono that only a small number of people pull into, and they would
always use --no-ff.  But that would be a significant change to the
mono development culture, and shouldn't be undertaken lightly,
especially if it doesn't seem like there's a real need for it.

I noticed when I first started to use git that there's an unreasonable
tendency to try to make the history graphs (or in your case, github
output) look pretty.  I learned that it's really just a waste of time,
because the history graphs really aren't that useful to humans, and
git itself doesn't care if they're pretty.  It's much better to ignore
them and get along with work.

Have fun,

Avery