On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 5:52 PM Raymond E. Pasco [off-list ref] wrote:

I feel like the parsimonious change to make is simply defaulting the
existing "pull.ff" to "only". I think someone who has set "pull.rebase"
expects pull --rebase behavior just as much as someone who passes
--rebase on the command line. The issue in question is what someone who
has not made any changes to the settings expects to happen with a plain
"git pull", and I certainly agree that people who are not power users
expect a fast-forward (I try not to force my opinions on workflow or
style when onboarding people to Git, but I do always recommend
"pull.ff=only" because I know this is a perennial pitfall).

The problem is that, as it stands now, this would just leave the user
with a cryptic error message ("Not possible to fast-forward, aborting")
when they wanted to see remote changes. I think this might warrant an
even more expanded message than the short one in this patch, but I'm
not sure exactly what it should say - there are a few things the user
might expect, but an error message isn't the best place for a crash
course.

Another problem is that when pull.ff=only but you really do want to
allow merging if fast-forwarding is impossible, having to type `git
pull --ff` to get that behavior is *very* counterintuitive :-(

-Alex