Re: GIT vs Other: Need argument

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Steven Grimm [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I wonder if it makes sense to automate that even more and make git
pull behave a bit statefully like rebase does:

Making things stateful may help, but when done without thinking
the consequence through, it would make things more confusing.

By the way, I never liked the way 'git rebase --continue' works.

[...]

in practice, after 'git rebase' stops on a conflicting
merge, I spend many braincycles to come up with a sensible merge
and then many CPU cycles to run test, and by the time I do the
final "git diff" to make sure everything look right and
"update-index" them, I often end up getting confused and find me
asking this question: what was I doing?  Was I resolving the
merge because I merged, or was I in the middle of a rebase, or
was I applying from a mailbox?

I do not know what would happen if I say "git commit" at that
point, but I suspect it would be unpleasant, so I have never
tried it myself.  But it takes nontrivial amount of effort to
convince myself that 'git rebase --continue' is what I want to
do next, not 'git commit' nor 'git am --resolved'.

And I suspect the reason this is confusing to me is not that
rebase keeps state but that the state is not made more obvious
to prevent mistakes from happening.  Earlier I mentioned perhaps
we would want "git, whatnow?" command to remind people what they
were in the middle of and suggest what the next step would be.
Or perhaps "git, continue" command that makes the obvious next
step to happen would be helpful.

You have even implemented "git explain" command, but it didn't get
into git. Perhaps it is time to resurrect it.
 

I am very much afraid that introducing more hidden state without
such "what now?"  framework in place would make things more
confusing and harder to use, not easier.

It would be nice to have such "git explain" command, both for use
in scripts (and perhaps also in builtins), and for the user (perhaps
"git status" should use it, too). 

And it could be used to implement "git continue" and "git abort" 
commands... (or "git, continue" and "git, abort" ;-).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland