With git/github I really only pull and push. I don't really use any of the other features. Same for the kids on my robotics team. The only thing I have taught them is pull and push. The kids do a pull at the beginning of practice and a push at the end. Yet sometimes I see this in the commit logs. Why are these merges happening? Even I have some merges and I know I didn't do anything differently. Should I be concerned? We are doing all of our git/gihub work in VS code if that matters.
Nothing wrong like others have mentioned. It sounds like this is for a robotics class so personally I wouldn’t spend time trying to get rid of them, it’s not a minor change to eliminate them
If you wanted to or want to look into it just to understand, you could do something like having each student work on separate branches that starts from main, then instead of pushing to the main branch they could create a pull request to merge their work back to main, and use a squash commit when closing that PR (this is the important part to get rid of the merge commits). In that way, there’s no divergence on main, main is like the trunk of your tree and everything else is accumulated / returned to main.
It is definitely a skill that would help the students if they end up in real world engineering roles using git, but personally I think that’s a lot of extra complexity for a non problem.
It is for a middle school robotics team (FIRST Lego League if you have ever heard of it). No, I don't have some burning desire to get rid of the merges. I was mostly woried that we were doing something wrong. We definitely do not have any branches. We really just use github to have a safe place to store our code and so that all of the laptops can have all of the code from all of the teammates.
For sure I don't want to add any complexity. I think that since from their end it looks like it is doing exactly what they think it does (i.e., I upload my code with a push, and I get everyone else's code with a pull), there's definitely no need to fix a non-problem.
Yeah, you’re good!