Pushing to staging from patches vs branches

[Paul Morris]

Hi all,

In CG 3.4.10 “Pushing to staging” it describes ways to push to staging from a 
patch file or from a branch:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/contributor/pushing-to-staging

I tried the branch instructions to avoid the extra step of having to create a 
patch file, but it resulted in an additional commit message about merging from 
the branch, which I saw in gitk.  The instructions say I "should see that 
staging is only ahead of origin/staging by the commits from your branch."  So I 
backed everything out and went with the patch approach instead and that worked 
fine.  

Now I’m wondering… Is there a way to use the branch approach without having 
that extra merge commit message?  Does everyone just use the patch approach?  
Maybe this should be covered in more depth in CG 3.4.10 since currently that 
merge commit is not mentioned and it is not clear whether having it is 
ok/preferred or not.

Thanks,
-Paul