Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

On Oct 25, 2007, at 10:18 PM, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Andreas Ericsson [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

With that in mind, how about making "git checkout foo", after
foo is set up thusly, to show:
	git log --pretty=oneline --left-right origin/pu...foo
if (and only if) they have diverged?  Then you can deal with the
staleness of local tracking fork 'foo' in any way you want.
You could even go one step further and make this "checkout foo",
in addition to or instead of showing the above left-right log,
 - automatically run "git merge origin/pu" if it is a
   fast-forward, and say it did _not_ run that merge if it is
   not a fast-forward;
 - automatically run "git merge origin/pu" always, even if it is
   not a fast-forward;
 - automatically run "git rebase origin/pu" always;
Would that make your life easier?

That it would, except the confusion would then be that it's  
automatically
rebased for the branches one currently hasn't got checked out while  
pulling,
and the branch that *is* checked out gets merged (crazy, yes), so  
those
who prefer the rebase would get what they want by doing something  
completely
bonkers, such as:

git checkout -b just-gonna-pull HEAD^
git pull
git checkout whatever-other-branch-they-were-on

(yes, "aggresively ignorant", I think Ted said in an earlier mail)

It'd probably be better to go with Dscho's suggestion, although I'm  
not quite
sure what that was any more. It involved automagical rebasing on  
fetch or pull
though.

git pull's automagic and the automatic behaviour of git checkout
proposed by Junio should always do the same. git pull should
be changed to act a if your three commands were fused into it
(but obviously implemented differently).

I think teaching "git checkout" a dwim mode is quite
interesting.  The required work to bring a local branch
up-to-date with a remote branch is deferred until really needed.
An then "git checkout" does the right thing. A lot of automagic
but definitely intriguing.

	Steffen