If ‘—first-parent’ was the default way that git log worked, I don’t think we’d even be having this argument over how to merge branches.

In my opinion, the best strategy is to always use a merge commit, and then when viewing master, always use —first-parent which will ONLY show commits on master. This gives you:

• a very clean, linear history
• the ability to let people work in their branches in their own way (it is ok to merge master into your branch multiple times without rebasing)
• you can dig into the history of any branch if needed
• it makes it easy to backport changes as you can cherry-pick out the merge commit which contains everything.

The problem is just the default log view of git and tools.