People working off of their own branches in complete isolation is probably not a good thing, even if you aren't "agile". Also, non fast-forward merging should

People working off of their own branches in complete isolation is probably not a good thing, even if you aren't "agile". Also, non fast-forward merging should only really happen between long-lived branches. Short-lived experimental/feature branches should almost always be brought back to master with a rebase. Otherwise you are cluttering up your git history with unnecessary merges. In the same vein, rebase should almost always be used when you are doing a `git pull` to sync a branch up with master - e.g. `git pull --rebase origin master`. You can set rebase to be the default pull strategy for newly created branches in your .gitconfig like so: [branch] autosetuprebase = always