Avoiding uninteresting merges in Cairo

I was just talking with jwatt today in #git and he pointed me at
the following email from

 http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-April/006648.html

after he had a merge gone wrong in his working directory and was
asking for help.

Cario has seriously been using `reset --hard HEAD^` as part of its
workflow since April?  Why haven't you pushed for a rebase merge
strategy to be tried before a trivial index merge as an option in
git-merge (e.g. pull.twohead=rebase recursive)?

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