Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

"Avery Pennarun" [off-list ref] writes:

svn avoids these excess merges by default, albeit because it puts your
working copy at risk every time you do "svn update".

By default?  As if it has other mode of operation.

Of course if you do not allow any commits in between to make the history
truly forked, you won't see merge commits.  It is like saying that you
like your broken keyboard whose SHIFT key does not work because you think
capital letters look ugly and your keyboard protects you from typing them
by accident.

Is that an improvement?

I won't waste my time further on the apples and rotten oranges comparison,
but you should perhaps listen to Linus's talk where he talks about why it
sucks that SVN/CVS _encourage_ you to keep your local changes uncommitted
for several weeks.

quoted

 You can skip merges with "git log --no-merges", just in case you didn't
 know.

Perhaps this is mostly a user education or documentation issue.  I
know about --no-merges, but it's unclear that this is really a safe
thing to use, particularly if some of your merges have conflicts.
Leaving them out leaves out an important part of history.  Do you use
this option yourself?

Very rarely.  When I run "git shortlog" for summary, it often is handy,
but otherwise no.