Looking at the pike-librarian for last friday, I see .gitignore being
fixed for the whitespace problem in 8 branches. So I would have
expected to see 8 commits. But instead I see a 8 commits, and 14
merges. This looks cluttered and bizarre to me. Why weren't the
fixes simply done on one branch and then cherry-picked to the others,
instead of this self-indulging juggling with merges?