Re: Use "git pull --ff-only" by default?

Peter Kjellerstedt venit, vidit, dixit 21.05.2010 14:59:

Is there some way to make "git pull --ff-only" be the default?
I could not find anything about this in "git config --help" and
also the lack of a --no-ff-only option for git pull (it exists 
for git merge) indicates that there is no such support.

I did considered the branch.<name>.mergeoptions configuration
option, but it does not seem appropriate as it only applies to
a specific branch, whereas I want it to apply to all branches
by default.

Yes, I know I could do "git config alias.pl 'pull --ff-only'",
but since my intensions are for this to be the default for all
developers in our organization (most of whom have no git knowledge
at all yet) to avoid unnecessary branches caused by the developers 
hacking directly on master rather than a topic branch, I would 
very much prefer a configuration option rather than an alias (as 
I am unlikely to get the developers to remember to do "git pl" 
instead of "git pull").

Problem is they have to remember to set your new config, or, if you are
able to set all developers system config, they have to refrain from
overriding it.

My idea was to add something like merge.options and pull.options
as configuration options (I want to be able to specify the options
separately for pull and merge). However, I wanted throw this out
here first before starting to hack away at the code, in case I
missed something obvious, or if others find this to be an
incredibly stupid idea...

In general, you can't control reliably what people do in their repos.
But you can control what kind of pushes into a central repo you allow.
That is the usual approach: Let them mess up their repos, they'll learn
their lesson when they can't push ;)

Michael