[craigching]

I believe you can flip a switch to turn on only allowing FF merges which should alleviate the situation. Certainly FF merges make a lot of things easier and "cleaner".

I guess maybe the reason git doesn't do this by default might be because the idea of rebasing early on (the "omg you're overwriting history in a RCS!!!!!") was a bit taboo and it's taken time for people to get used to the idea. Note that I'm just speculating about that, I did follow the git discussion early on and I know that people then (and still are to some degree) afraid of "rewriting history" (note that I quote that because I don't really see it that way).