[kostarelo]

> It was even worse that those driving it didn’t really know much about git so 95% of the commit messages were “Merged X into Y...” instead of using a more linear history.

How so? Why merge commits are bad? Are you suggesting of rebasing each topic branch or commiting directly to the master?

[damnyou]

Merge commits are bad because they add unnecessary complexity. Your software is already complex enough. Why add complexity to your commit logs and your overall development process?

A linear history is easy to manage and easy to understand. It might be slightly worse for people committing code, but developers read several orders of magnitude more code than they write. Always optimize for reading code over writing it.