Git merge without auto commit

Note the output while doing the merge - it is saying Fast Forward

In such situations, you want to do:

git merge v1.0 --no-commit --no-ff

You're misunderstanding the meaning of the merge here.

The --no-commit prevents the MERGE COMMIT from occuring, and that only happens when you merge two divergent branch histories; in your example that's not the case since Git indicates that it was a "fast-forward" merge and then Git only applies the commits already present on the branch sequentially.

If you only want to commit all the changes in one commit as if you typed yourself, --squash will do too

$ git merge --squash v1.0
$ git commit