> The merge commit really ought not have any changes of its own, but lots of people consider minor conflict resolution legal. I'm not sure where this rule come

> The merge commit really ought not have any changes of its own, but lots of people consider minor conflict resolution legal. I'm not sure where this rule comes from. For code review, I for one normally review all of the changes that are going into master, and only look commit-by-commit if it becomes overwhelming - so, unless this is a huge merge (which should generally be avoided anyway), I wouldn't really see how this is a problem. The only real problem I have with merging into your local branch to keep it in sync with master is the way it pollutes history when it is finally merged back into master. This is enough of a problem that I and my team always rebase unless we end up in one of these rare cases that I was highlighting.