Merge Commits are Back (and Better than Ever)
After a long hiatus, we’re linking to merge commits again. We truncated merge commits months ago, because they didn’t provide any information beyond the shas of the parents, but now…
After a long hiatus, we’re linking to merge commits again. We truncated merge commits months ago, because they didn’t provide any information beyond the shas of the parents, but now we’re exposing the diff between them as an overview of what changed in the branch.
Essentially, what we’re doing behind the scenes is: git diff parent1…parent2

This page will become the basis for a more extensive code review system that, coupled with our current code commenting, will really provide a lot of value for large projects.
(If older merge commits aren’t showing diffs, it’s most likely that it got cached without the additional data)
Written by
Related posts
Bringing more transparency to GitHub’s status page
Changes to the status page will provide more specific data, so you’ll have better insight into the overall health of the platform.
Developer policy update: Intermediary liability, copyright, and transparency
We’re sharing recent policy updates that developers should know about, updating our Transparency Center with the full year of 2025 data, and looking to what’s ahead.
GitHub availability report: March 2026
In March, we experienced four incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.