On 10/17/06, Aaron Bentley [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
In other words, the empty merge is totally semantically empty even in the
bazaar world. Why does it exist?
It exists because it is useful. Because it makes the behavior of bzr
merge uniform. Because in some workflows, commits show that a person
has signed off on a change.
In the Git world that happens via "git tag -s", i.e, a
cryptographically strong "signoff".
(There's also the secondary convention of appending Signed-off-by: to
email-applied patches, but that's something that would translate
effectively to any other system, since it's outside the SCM.)