I was working a pull request where the contributor had done multiple merges of master into its topic branch during development. So we had many merge commits nestled in his pull request. The awesome thing I learned about Git today (courtesy of the folks on #github) is that rebasing that will weed out the merge commits! So amazingly simple. Basically, following my normal pull request process[1], just after fetching their work and switching to that branch I did `rebase master` and that got rid of all the merge commits :) If you happen to find yourself in the same boat at some point... [1] https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Handling-Pull-Requests-(S... -- steve(a)hibernate.org http://hibernate.org