Git fast forward VS no fast forward merge

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?

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]."

I can give an example commonly seen in project.

Here, option --no-ff (i.e. true merge) creates a new commit with multiple parents, and provides a better history tracking. Otherwise, --ff (i.e. fast-forward merge) is by default.

$ git checkout master
$ git checkout -b newFeature
$ ...
$ git commit -m 'work from day 1'
$ ...
$ git commit -m 'work from day 2'
$ ...
$ git commit -m 'finish the feature'
$ git checkout master
$ git merge --no-ff newFeature -m 'add new feature'
$ git log
// something like below
commit 'add new feature'         // => commit created at merge with proper message
commit 'finish the feature'
commit 'work from day 2'
commit 'work from day 1'
$ gitk                           // => see details with graph

$ git checkout -b anotherFeature        // => create a new branch (*)
$ ...
$ git commit -m 'work from day 3'
$ ...
$ git commit -m 'work from day 4'
$ ...
$ git commit -m 'finish another feature'
$ git checkout master
$ git merge anotherFeature       // --ff is by default, message will be ignored
$ git log
// something like below
commit 'work from day 4'
commit 'work from day 3'
commit 'add new feature'
commit 'finish the feature'
commit ...
$ gitk                           // => see details with graph

(*) Note that here if the newFeature branch is re-used, instead of creating a new branch, git will have to do a --no-ff merge anyway. This means fast forward merge is not always eligible.

When we work on development environment and merge our code to staging/production branch then Git no fast forward can be a better option. Usually when we work in development branch for a single feature we tend to have multiple commits. Tracking changes with multiple commits can be inconvenient later on. If we merge with staging/production branch using Git no fast forward then it will have only 1 commit. Now anytime we want to revert the feature, just revert that commit. Life is easy.

Git visualization

Here are the git log visualizations with the differences. These are what the trees looked like creating three branches from dev called 1 2 3, then merging with and without fast-forward. I'll put the setup code at the bottom. You can paste a paragraph of commands into your terminal to quickly setup and reset different git scenarios, which was very helpful in learning git.

Notice that with fast-forward, git doesn't even indicate a merge.

--no-ff			--ff (default)

* Merge 3
| * 3
* | Merge 2		* Merge 3
| | * 2         | * 3
| |/            * | Merge 2
* / Merge 1     | | * 2
|/              | |/
| * 1           * / 1
|/              |/
* main          * main

It's worth comparing this approach with rebasing.

Setup/teardown

You can run this repeatedly and it'll delete and reinitialize the repo. It's for windows, so I think you'll just have to change the filepath and the rd remove directory commands if you're on *nix.

To see the behavior with fast-forward, remove --no-ff from the merge commands at the end. Remove the --pretty piece if you want to see the commit IDs.

cd \user\docs\code\learning\github\sandbox
rd /s /q 0.git 1 2 3
git init --bare 0.git
git clone 0.git 1
cd 1
git config user.name "user"
git config user.email "[email protected]"
git commit --allow-empty -m main
git switch -c 1 main
git commit --allow-empty -m 1
git switch -c 2 main
git commit --allow-empty -m 2
git switch -c 3 main
git commit --allow-empty -m 3
git switch main
git merge --no-ff 1
git merge --no-ff 2
git merge --no-ff 3
git log --graph --oneline --first-parent --all --pretty=%s

It is possible also that one may want to have personalized feature branches where code is just placed at the end of day. That permits to track development in finer detail.

I would not want to pollute master development with non-working code, thus doing --no-ff may just be what one is looking for.

As a side note, it may not be necessary to commit working code on a personalized branch, since history can be rewritten git rebase -i and forced on the server as long as nobody else is working on that same branch.

Besides the posted reasons to use --no-ff, keeping a correct parent order in the target branch is another one.

Using --no-ff, the parent order in your last commit will be independent of the parent order in the last commit of the branch you are merging, its first parent will be the branch you are on. If you perform a ff, the commit with the same parents would be incorporated to the target branch, so the first parent of you last commit in your branch will be pointing to a commit out of the mainline. This is not probably what you want.

You could for instance use --first-parent to filter a branch history to see only the major changes to a branch, or other operations where the first parent is used by default, like revert. If your branch does not keep a correct parent referencing, the results would be different than expected.