Use rebase instead of merge for PRs

[edannenberg]

I find the current git history really hard to work with due to all the pointless merge commits. Picasso would have been proud. ;) Ideally the history for any given branch should be a straight line.

Proposal: Come up with a git strategy that prevents those issues in the future and gives users a clean view of what changed.

For starters:

• PR should always get rebased so a FF merge can be used which eliminates those pesky merge commits, the Github interface has options for that so the time impact for maintainers should be minimal
• Strict rules regarding commit messages
  • Should be rather verbose for fixes
  • Maybe use starting tags like [fix] or [bug], etc, so the git history can be scraped to generate a, sorely needed, changelog for this repo

If a middle ground for this can be found I can offer to unfuck the current history of the 1.9.3.x branch.

[blopa]

+1 for rebasing

[tomekjordan]

I dream about Changelog file... like Algolia, Nosto and zillions github projects provide

[tmotyl]

I'm all for it. But please also see discussion here #155

[edannenberg]

@tmotyl I see, this can be closed then.