Git fast forward VS no fast forward merge

Question

Git merge allow us to perform fast forward and no fast fast forward branch merging. Any ideas when to use fast forward merge and when to use no fast forward merge?

Answer 1

The --no-ff option is useful when you want to have a clear notion of your feature branch. So even if in the meantime no commits were made, FF is possible - you still want sometimes to have each commit in the mainline correspond to one feature. So you treat a feature branch with a bunch of commits as a single unit, and merge them as a single unit. It is clear from your history when you do feature branch merging with --no-ff.

If you do not care about such thing - you could probably get away with FF whenever it is possible. Thus you will have more svn-like feeling of workflow.

For example, the author of this article thinks that --no-ff option should be default and his reasoning is close to that I outlined above:

Consider the situation where a series of minor commits on the "feature" branch collectively make up one new feature: If you just do "git merge feature_branch" without --no-ff, "it is impossible to see from the Git history which of the commit objects together have implemented a feature—you would have to manually read all the log messages. Reverting a whole feature (i.e. a group of commits), is a true headache [if --no-ff is not used], whereas it is easily done if the --no-ff flag was used [because it's just one commit]."