[lelandbatey]

Just to explain "Silence":

Apparently, git does not allow you to alias default git commands (like "pull", "push", "commit", etc) to something else. In the given situation, a user is trying to alias the default "pull" command to "pull --ff-only" so that pull will not automatically merge changes and will only fast-forward.

However, since git does not allow you to alias default commands, when the Git Master runs "git pull" it ignores the alias entirely and does a normal pull, and in so doing merges changes. The student is confused, but eventually figures it out.