[kansface]

Merge commits, particularly those that merged master multiple times effectively destroy history (by preserving it). For that matter, many projects maintain all commits to master should work! Unless you advocate only committing entirely working states (unlikely for large features), you'd have to rebase.

[mikeash]

Can you explain what you mean by effectively destroying history by preserving it? That doesn't make any sense to me. And I also don't understand the link between merge commits and a failure to ensure that all commits to master should work. If you make changes in a branch, get everything up and running there, then merge to master, does that not ensure that everything on master works?