What makes Evil Merges in Git … Evil?

The Git Glossary defines an “Evil merge” as…

a merge that introduces changes that do not appear in any parent.

To me that sounds like any merge with a non-trivial conflict. The sort of conflict that needs hand editing, rather than simply taking yours or theirs for each hunk. That’s pretty common, so why is it evil? To be honest I’m just guessing, but one feature of git that slowed me down considerably when trying to find out who had removed some lines from the file is that git log pretends that merge commits don’t change any files. Try

git log --stat

on a repository with merges. It says merges never change any files, even though they really do. Adding the options -c, --cc or -m to git log suddenly shows merge stats for files which had to change in a merge. When you do a search with git pickaxe the behaviour is the same; the search won’t find anything in merge commits unless you use one of those options.

To me that sounds totally crazy, but perhaps it makes some sense if you’re interested in where changes were first introduced. In that case you’re interested in the initial commit which created the change, not the merge-commit which is a later artifact of the revision control process.

However it hides the contents of Evil Merges by default and to my mind that is Git rather than the Merge being Evil.