why skip the merge commits?

why skip the merge commits?

For all commits, what is recorded is the resulting state and the commit(s) which went into it. In order to determine if there were conflicts, you just try merging the inputs yourself and see if it's trivial or not. Of course, you can't tell if the person who actually did the merge used some special strategy which knew how to do the merge without conflicts. If your try didn't give conflicts, you should also compare the result against the commit, because it's possible that the person fixed stuff that didn't get flagged as a conflict (e.g., the two branches added the same function in different places, and the person removed one copy when the compiler complained).

In a sense, all merges are events (otherwise, you get a fast-forward), but an external observer can never really tell how much of the event was done by the committer and how much was done by software. Who knows, somebody might have a secret special sparse-based C source merger.

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.