doc: explain why we don't use the GitHub merge button

@cjihrig

I get asked why we can't use the GitHub merge button at onboardings from time to time and I never know what issues with it are real and what I merely imagine.

onboarding.md currently says:

Please never use GitHub's green "Merge Pull Request" button.

If you do, please force-push removing the merge.

And that's it. One or two sentences explaining the deal-breaker incompatibilities with our workflow would be great. @cjihrig? Someone else?

@cjihrig

the latest rebase feature changes the author

the old rebase and merge feature adds meta data to the commit title

the original merge method adds a merge commit

On Sun, Oct 2, 2016, 1:53 AM Rich Trott notifications@github.com wrote:

I get asked this at onboardings from time to time and I never know what
issues with it are real and what's just in my mind.

onboarding.md currently says:

Please never use GitHub's green "Merge Pull Request" button.

If you do, please force-push removing the merge.

And that's it. One or two sentences explaining the deal-breaker
incompatibilities with our workflow would be great. @cjihrig
https://github.com/cjihrig? Someone else?

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the old rebase and merge feature adds meta data to the commit title

Squash/merge does that by default, but isn't it possible to modify the commit message while merging?

@not-an-aardvark

@not-an-aardvark I've personally experienced it adding the meta data without an obvious way to avoid it. At the very least it is error prone enough that I do not believe the pain is worth the benefit

@thealphanerd

the latest rebase feature changes the author

yep, I dealt with that last week while cutting v6.7.0.

I would say that @thealphanerd's comment (#8893 (comment)) describes it pretty well.

@thealphanerd

Yeah, what @thealphanerd said.

(All of which make viewing commits / tooling / attribution / etc more difficult.)

Have we documented anywhere why we add Reviewed-By? I'm not sure what it's good for.

It's like git blame for reviewers.

Have we documented anywhere why we add Reviewed-By? I'm not sure what it's good for.

It also gives a list of people to @mention / contact when something goes wrong, and doesn’t require the assumption that Github lasts forever for that ;)

We generally don't use Github merge button when we don't want the changes in our branch to be merged with the upstream branch ; for this we can also close the pull request without merging.