Software Development

Why does git merge take the source branch rather than the destination branch as a parameter?

The most common merge case by far for me is "Okay, this branch looks good, let's merge it into branch X", where X is often something like master.

Normally, if you're merging, you would expect that some new commits have arrived on the branch recently. If these came from git commit, then obviously you would have the source branch checked out already, which necessitates a clumsy checkout and merge. If these came from git fetch, then you would likewise want to checkout the source branch and see the changes first.

I struggle to think of any use cases for merging from. Why was the merge command designed this way?

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Why is git merge from rather than to?

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