Gerrit Pape [off-list ref] writes:
After doing a merge --squash, and commit afterwards, the commit message
template SQUASH_MSG in the git directory is not removed, which means that
the content of SQUASH_MSG is used as default commit message for all
subsequent commits. So have git commit remove the file SQUASH_MSG from
the git directory upon a successful commit.
It appears that there are a few more differences from what
contrib/examples/git-commit.sh used to do. For example, the
COMMIT_EDITMSG file used to be removed at around the same place
as the SQUASH_MSG file.