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git/no-merge-commits ​

Severity: warning · Status: enforced · Applies to: repository-wide

What ​

A pull request should not contain merge commits.

Why ​

GitHub's "Sync fork" button merges the upstream branch into yours. That pulls every commit it caught up on into your pull request, so a one-line redirect change arrives carrying a hundred unrelated commits and a merge commit on top.

Hundreds of such merges have reached master in this repository, most of them the Merge branch 'perma-id:master' into ... shape that button produces. They add no content and make the change hard to read.

Rebasing puts your work on top of the current master instead, so the pull request contains your commits and nothing else.

Wrong ​

$ git log --oneline upstream/master..HEAD
9f3c1a2  Merge branch 'perma-id:master' into my-branch
7b2d4e8  Add redirect for my-project
$ git log --oneline upstream/master..HEAD
7b2d4e8  Add redirect for my-project

How to fix ​

sh
git fetch upstream
git branch backup-my-change   # a copy to go back to if this goes wrong
git rebase upstream/master
git push --force-with-lease

If you have not added the upstream remote:

sh
git remote add upstream https://github.com/perma-id/w3id.org.git

If a rebase goes wrong partway through, git rebase --abort returns to where you started. Your original commits are still on backup-my-change afterwards. Often the simplest recovery is to start a fresh branch from upstream/master and re-apply your change by hand — it is usually two files. Delete the copy with git branch -D backup-my-change once the pull request is merged.

How to check ​

Run w3id-check with --rule git/no-merge-commits to check this rule on its own; without it the tool runs every rule, as the pull request checks do. This rule looks at your commits rather than your files, so it needs a base to compare against; narrowing it to a path would not change what it reports.

sh
node tools/check/bin/w3id-check.js --rule git/no-merge-commits

Testing your changes covers installing the tool, and what else is worth checking by hand.

See also ​