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This also eliminates the use of the "Merge pull request" button which removes all the pull-request-merged-commits.

I don't know about you guys, but I have not found them useful? Do you use the merge commits for anything?

I always use "--no-ff" when merging topic branches to master. The advantage is that you can keep individual commits on the topic branch readable and still get an overview of the changes between two releases with "git log --first-parent".

You can also see the set of changes in a topic merge easily with "git log ${merge}^2..${merge}^1" whereas if you use a fast-forward merge it's not at all obvious which sets of commits are related.

We use the merge commits to trace back a given deploy or machine image to the pull request that caused it. So from a given deployed AMI, a Jenkins job can point to the pull request, and hence the full context of the feature or bug description, the back-and-forth of code review, etc.

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