Re: [PATCH] Give better 'pull' advice when pushing non-ff updates to current branch

Christopher Tiwald [off-list ref] writes:

I think that might be the way to go. I approached this from a specific
workflow assumption. In retrospect, I can't divine the motivation of
merge configurations well enough to avoid bad advice.

I am very sympathetic to your underlying motivation to avoid telling
them to "perform a git pull to integrate the history from the other side
before you push" and then getting misunderstood as if you told them to
LITERALLY type "git pull<RETURN>".  Depending on how the branch the user
wanted to push, the approach needed to update its history so that
contains the history from the other side will be different, and you need
to have everything configured correctly for your case to be able to type
"git pull<RETURN>" literally and get the right result.  If you were trying
to push one-shot into somewhere you do not usually push to, it is very
likely that you would need to say "git pull $there $that", and there is
no canned "Type this LITERALLY to continue" recipe that is appropriate
in the advice message.

Perhaps a safer way out is to phrase the advice message in such a way
that it is crystal clear to anybody halfway intelligent that there is
nothing the user can cut and paste from there?