I've been telling people lately to always fetch and merge --ff-only separately, which is more commands but less confusing behavior. If you've got merge.default

I've been telling people lately to always fetch and merge --ff-only separately, which is more commands but less confusing behavior. If you've got merge.defaultToUpstream set to true, you can alias ff = merge --ff-only. That way you can be careful about rebases, and don't have them automatically happening behind your back. So the workflow is: % git fetch # can never fail with a conflict % git ff # tries to fast-forward # if fast-forward fails, then % git rebase origin/upstreambranch