Re: [PATCH 0/3] Reject non-ff pulls by default

On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 09:10:47AM +0100, John Keeping wrote:

I think there are two distinct uses for pull, which boil down to:

    (1) git pull
    (2) git pull $remote $branch

For (1) a merge is almost always the wrong thing to do since it will be
backwards and break --first-parent.

Is it always wrong? You are assuming a topic-branch workflow where
--first-parent is actually meaningful. What about a centralized workflow
where everyone works on "master"? The correct thing to do on a non-ff
push in that case is "git pull && git push". Some people would argue
that the pull should rebase there, but I think there are valid arguments
either way. We can discuss in that direction if you want.

I can perhaps buy the argument that it is better to help people who are
using a topic branch workflow (which we generally want to encourage) to
avoid making backwards merges, and the cost is that people with sloppy
workflows will have to do more work / configuration. But we should be
clear that this is a tradeoff we are making.

The patch in jc/pull-training-wheel talks about annoying old timers, but
I think you may also be annoying clueless new users who simply want an
svn-like workflow without thinking too hard about it.

quoted

I do not think we know what we want is to affect "git pull origin".

I consider "git pull $remote" to be an artifact of the way git-pull is
implemented on top of git-fetch; perhaps I'm missing something but I
can't see a scenario where this is useful.

Imagine a workflow where each topic is in its own repository instead of
in its own branch inside a repository. Or where each developer has his
or her own repository, but everybody just works on the master branch of
their repository (or perhaps uses branches, but keeps master as a stable
base). Alice is the integration manager; Bob tells her that he has work
ready to integrate.  She runs "git pull ~bob/project", which will merge
Bob's HEAD.

This is not very different from the kernel workflow, where Linus may do
a "git pull $remote" to fetch a sub-system maintainer's work, except
that these days people typically mark the to-be-integrated work in a
"for-linus" branch or tag. However, you can find many "Merge git://"
entries even in recent kernel history.

I think this kind of pull would fall into the same situation as your (2)
above.

-Peff