What do you mean by "empty merge commits"? Because of the way Linux development is structured, it's probably highly unlikely for maintainer to ever merge a fas

What do you mean by "empty merge commits"? Because of the way Linux development is structured, it's probably highly unlikely for maintainer to ever merge a fast-forwardable branch into their tree, but conflict-less (empty?) merges sure do happen. Linux doesn't try to keep its history linear in any way, so merges actually represent the actual graph of merged branches.