<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Dec 18, 2019, at 8:03 AM, James Y Knight via llvm-dev <<a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org" class="">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class="">The rule against merge commits is primarily because we want to encourage people to make reasonable separate commits to master which are sensible (reviewable, buildable, etc) in isolation. And, to make it so the history is more easily understandable to humans. It's not only that we don't want merge commits -- we actually don't really want people doing merges, in general.</div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class="">But, here we actually<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i class="">do</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>have a merge, because flang was developed externally. This is an exceptional circumstance (and I'm sure we'll have a few more). Using a merge commit in this circumstance makes it easier for humans looking at history to understand what's going on here, rather than harder -- because it actually marks the merge as being a merge. That's the main reason why I think we ought to use a merge commit here.</div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>This is a great summary of both sides of the policy, thanks James. I agree,</div><div><br class=""></div><div>-Chris</div></body></html>