Un wanted SourceTree merges

[André Borud]

I've been working in the master branch of a project that is stored on bitbucket using git and I use SourceTree to manage it. 

Yesterday I merged in a branch with the master one, but noticed that there has been merges with other branches prior to my merge. In SourceTree it says that I made the merge. In bitbucket it says that an anonymous user made the merge (strange as it is a private repo). I have absolutely no recollection of the previous merges. 

Is there some kind of automated thing I have missed or anything that could have made this if I haven't ever even clicked on one of the other branches in sourcetree? 

All I ever do is commit, pull changes if any, and push. How should that merge a branch?

[inside-logic · Accepted solution]

What I see when I am working with Git (and SourceTree but this is a Git functionality AFAIK) is that a pull from a branch to another branch will create a merge from that branch into this other branch. Might that be your effect that your pulls are those merges?

If I don't overwrite the suggested commit message the default message says something like: Merge branch 'master' of "someremote location" into myBranch.

[Tim Crall]

A "pull" is very much a "merge". Specifically, it's a "fetch" plus a "merge".

[Tim Crall]

But you probably shouldn't be "pulling" anything into the master branch aside from the remote version of the same branch.

[inside-logic]

Right. Now that you mention it I remember that I read some documentation sometime back about fetch and merge :-). I just recalled that from my tests with sourcetree and when learning git I saw the effect in my test projects.