Example of no-ff merges

Master branch

master branch with a linear history:

Development branch

master branch is periodically merged to dev branch.

git checkout dev
git merge --no-ff master

Test branch

dev branch is periodically merged to test branch.

git checkout test
git merge --no-ff dev

Production branch

test branch is periodically merged to prod branch.

git checkout prod
git merge --no-ff test

All branches

Observations

• The "all branches" view gets complicated quite fast, but individual dev/test/prod branches look ok
• You can edit the commit message when performing a merge, e.g. for adding some semantic meaning to the merge:
  • "Merge for release 1.2.3"
• Plain git rebase will discard merge commits
  • If you accidentally make a local commit to e.g. dev branch and use rebase to remove it, you might accidentally also remove the "merge branch 'master' into dev" -commits.
  • git rebase -i --rebase-merges [commit] will preserve merge commits