Useful git commit messages for merged branches

Question

As a follow-up to this question:

If I'm working on a team by myself, I can maintain useful commit messages when merging branches by squashing all the commits to a single diff and then merging that diff. That way I can easily see what changes were introduced in the branch, and I have a single summary describing the feature/change/whatever that was accomplished in that branch when browsing the master branch.

My question now is, how can I accomplish this when working with a team? In that situation, the branches will be pushed to a remote repository, meaning that I can't squash all the commits in the branch down to a single commit. If the branch is public, can I still have a single useful merge commit in the master branch? (By "useful" I mean that the commit in the master line tells me (1) a useful summary of what was done in the branch and (2) diffs of the same.)

Answer 1

This turns out to be pretty simple to do, using some git merge flags I wasn't familiar with.

• The -e flag allows you to edit the message that occurs when you merge.
• The --log flag appends the one-line commit message from all commits in the branch to be merged to the commit message, making it easier to remember what you've done.