Just a heads up, to keep things simple, i disabled Merge commits on github.
you can always use rebase and merge on github, which has been our way of merging for a few years, or use the scripts we have always used. And if you are a git-fu master and ever push commits directly into apache.. please keep the history linear. It's really difficult to use git log when there are merge points on the commit log. (cherry-picking into a maintenance branch would be fairly difficult to be done). Thanks -- Clebert Suconic
