Both contain the full diff but squash destroys the history completely whereas no-ff includes a reference to it, so it can be optionally stores and downloaded.
Discussion
Pretty excited to play with this tonight! Thank you for the help sir!
So it looks like a --no-ff is not what I wanted. It stuffed all of the develop branch git history into master which it did NOT want :/ Am I using it wrong?
Features are merged into develop, develop is used as a staging branch. I want to keep full develop history. CI tests are run against develop. Once CI tests pass on develop I want to merge changes only (no history) into master. CI is triggered to publish against master, this is a release. Master is merged back into develop to avoid merge conflicts. All feature branches checkout develop not master.