this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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I never thought about it and instantly wanted to reply "wait why can't you do that‽" but now that I thought about it, what would you want the history to look like in that case? A slightly weird rebase? A single commit which seemingly copy pasted the entire other branch with no relation to it left behind?
I think it doesn't really make sense. Because you can't "squash" one commit. squash is taking multiple commits and making them one.
When you do a "squash merge" you are really saying "squash all the commits that are on this branch and not the target" then merge.
So you can't "squash a merge commit" you need at least one additional commit to squash in.
I don't work with merges, so maybe I'm way off base, but I thought they meant, they're working on another branch or fork, then merging the base branch into theirs every so often to get the newest changes, and then that creates multiple merge commits, which they can't squash at the end...?
I'm not sure, about that last part, but the rest, I've definitely seen with contributors that didn't know to work with rebases (and unfortunately we're on GitHub, which only half-assedly supports working with rebases by default).