I totally agree it should have been a merge request and the master branch should be protected so novices can't merge to it. There is a chance that the merge it

I totally agree it should have been a merge request and the master branch should be protected so novices can't merge to it. There is a chance that the merge itself breaks the build. I must say that in practise we don't often see this. Maybe because we keep our branches small. Other people seem to be more aware of this problem https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176