When working with git professionally over some years, a question raises up quite often: Which merge strategy to use? I don't want to write a comprehensive guide about merge strategies, since this has been addressed often already. Instead, I want to point out one argument against merge commits that is important to safety relevant software in particular.

To explain the problem in detail, I created an example project in my GitHub profile along with an explanatory readme, so I won't duplicate the explanation here again. In short, merge commits could be dangerous since they create unreviewed and untested code states.

There are many arguments for different merge strategies and while always dependent on the context, I'm a believer in fast forward merges since many years. I never faced version control issues, maintained a clean linear history and was always forced to resolve issues before merging. However, I understand in projects with a high merge rate, it might not be feasible to rebase and adapt, since in the meantime new changes might be added to the target branch.