Re: [PATCH] push: mention "git pull" in error message for non-fast forwards

Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] writes:

This reminds me: sometimes people blindly “git pull” a rebased history
just to avoid a non-fast-forward push, and it irks me to no end.  So if
I were running the world, the output would be:

 error: rejected non-fast-forward push to '<url>'
 hint: To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates are
 hint: rejected by default.
 hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help'
 hint: for details.

If you were running the world, you'd still need to add stg like

   YES, I DO MEAN IT, RTFM BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, AND DON'T COMPLAIN
   BEFORE YOU REACH THE END OF THE MANPAGE.

or so, at least if your friends look like my students ;-)

and the relevant section of the manual would explain that

 1. if upstream is ahead of you, you may want to "git pull"

but

 2. if upstream rebased, you may want to "git pull --rebase", and
    yell at upstream a little while at it.

and

 3. if the history you are pushing to is both (1) known to be unstable
    and (2) wrong, you can override it with
    "git push <remote> +<refspec>".  Be sure to make sure the
    “[receive] denyNonFastForwards” setting is unset correctly in this
    case.

It's not that far from what the manpage says indeed (it talks about
--force instead of +<refspec>, and mentions both pull and pull
--rebase). But when the user reached the point where (s)he's wiling to
read the doc and finds it interesting, then (s)he'll also read about
advice.pushNonFastForward and get rid of the whole (now useless)
message ;-).

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/