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Q&A How do I customize merge behavior for a shared git repo?

I often find it useful to arrange things so that each commit on master's first-parent is a discrete change. It allows git log --first-parent --oneline to be used as a concise, automatically-generat...

1 answer  ·  posted 4y ago by ajv‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by GrantMoyer‭

Question git git-merge
#2: Post edited by user avatar Alexei‭ · 2020-09-02T15:52:16Z (over 4 years ago)
I often find it useful to arrange things so that each commit on master's first-parent is a discrete change. It allows `git log --first-parent --oneline` to be used as a concise, automatically-generated changelog.

There are various ways this can get screwed up. The one I'm most aware of arises from rhombus topologies, where master was merged into a topic branch, perhaps to resolve merge conflicts ahead of submitting a PR:

```
A---B---D <----master
 \       \
  E---F---G <---topic
```

Here, when merging topic back into master, you get a fast-forward merge by default, and the resulting parents are backwards.

On the other hand, if you avoid fast-forward merges, you get useless merge bubbles instead. That's not ideal, either:

```
A---B---C <----master
 \ / \ /
  d   e
```

I would like to set things up so that, by default, parent swapping doesn't happen and merge-bubbles are avoided. I'd like this policy to "travel with the repo", so my teammates don't have to worry about whether they're doing the right thing.

Is this possible? As I understand it, git has hooks for controlling its behavior, but I don't know if this is a thing they can do.
#1: Initial revision by user avatar ajv‭ · 2020-09-01T21:42:19Z (over 4 years ago)
How do I customize merge behavior for a shared git repo?
I often find it useful to arrange things so that each commit on master's first-parent is a discrete change. It allows `git log --first-parent --oneline` to be used as a concise, automatically-generated changelog.

There are various ways this can get screwed up. The one I'm most aware of arises from rhombus topologies, where master was merged into a topic branch, perhaps to resolve merge conflicts ahead of submitting a PR:

```
A---B---D <----master
 \       \
  E---F---G <---topic
```

Here, when merging topic back into master, you get a fast-forward merge by default, and the resulting parents are backwards.

On the other hand, if you avoid fast-forward merges, you get useless merge bubbles instead. That's not ideal, either:

```
A---B---C <----master
 \ / \ /
  d   e
```

I would like to set things up so that, by default, parent swapping doesn't happen and merge-bubbles are avoided. I'd like this policy to "travel with the repo", so my teammates don't have to worry about whether they're doing the right thing.

Is this possible? As I understand it, git has hooks for controlling its behavior, but I don't know if this is a thing they can do.
git