As I've been working with some friends on a GitHub-hosted project lately, I've seen tons of seemingly extraneous merge commits in our master branch that look something like this:
Merge branch 'master' of github.com:owner/repo
This can seem confusing, especially to those coming from a subversion paradigm, for a few reasons:
- You see it when you're working on master. If there's no branching happening, why is there a merge?
- The merge commit includes changes that have already been committed, so it looks like they're happening twice.
What Causes This?
When you're
