On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 5:59 PM Felipe Contreras
[off-list ref] wrote:

But in my mind "fast-forward" is not a noun, it's an adjective, so I
still expect a noun: fast-forward $what. And I don't have any other
noun to put there but "merge".

It's a "fast-forward operation". :-)

(The operands are branch name and hash ID.)

It's just been nouned, like "a merge" instead of "a merge commit".

quoted

quoted

Perhaps: a merge, a rebase, or a fast-forward?

Sure, that works; in fact, that's much better than my suggestion.  I like it.

I like this one too.

In a perfect world, I'd have had `git pull` be the user facing command
that does one of: fetch only, fetch-and-fast-forward, fetch-and-rebase,
or fetch-and-merge.  (Obviously one can achieve the fetch-only by
running `git fetch`, but `git fetch` is a plumbing command.)

In that same perfect world, the default probably would have been
fetch only, but fetch-and-fast-forward (or fail if not fast-forward-able)
seems like an OK default as well. But we have to deal with the
imperfect world we have. This seems like an OK way to do that.