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

On Sun, Sep 08, 2013 at 05:38:50PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Yeah, but the key question at hand in this discussion is; what happens
when 'git pull' stops working for them, and they don't know what to
do, will they choose 'git pull --rebase' by mistake?

I agree, they will not choose git pull --rebase by mistake.

I say the answer is no, because:

1) As you say in your scenario, somebody is telling these guys what to
do, so when 'git pull' fails, somebody will figure out that they were
doing a merge, so 'git pull --merge' is what they want to type from
now on.

Yes, that would be me.  My hesitance here is that as the one usually
driving git updates (which so far have happened once a year), I will end
up retraining forty developers.  I don't think the current behavior is
broken or really problematic at all: merging has always been the
default, and people have come to expect that.  People using workflows
that don't want merge have always either needed to set a configuration
option or use --rebase.  As the man page says, --rebase is unsafe, and
that's why it's not the default.

I would be much less unhappy with your earlier change that did not
affect uses with arguments.  That would limit the number of use cases
affected.

2) Git itself would be warning them for months that a 'non
fast-forward was found, and a merge will be done for them', so when
the warning turns to an error, they'll know they want a merge, so
they'll do 'git pull --merge', either because the warning told them
that's git was doing all along, or because they figured that out by
googling, or reading the man page, or whatever.

Again, you assume that git updates happen on a regular basis, and you
assume that most developers really know what happens under the hood.

I don't see a warning now; in fact, I see:

  vauxhall ok % git status
  # On branch master
  # Your branch and 'upstream/master' have diverged,
  # and have 1 and 128 different commits each, respectively.
  #   (use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours)
  #

The current behavior of git is to explicitly encourage this behavior,
and now you want to make it not work.  I think this change is a bad
idea, and I think the number of changes required to the test suite
indicates that.  If there's going to be a change here, it should have a
deprecation period with the above message changed and appropriate
warnings, not a flag day; your patches don't do that.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 832 623 2791 | http://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only
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