Re: [PATCH] Add branch.*.localmerge and documentation update

From: Josef Weidendorfer <josef.weidendorfer@gmx.de>
Date: Dec 8, 2006, 23:17 UTC
Message-ID: <200612090017.44105.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <7v1wnaggp7.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Friday 08 December 2006 23:34, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> >> What convenience would it buy us (including but not limited to
> >> new people), and if there is any, would that outweigh the
> >> potential confusion factor to have two different configuration
> >> variables that do exactly the same thing whose sole difference
> >> is which side of the fetched branch namespace it uses to specify
> >> the merge source?
> >
> > I just came up with a concrete patch.
> > I am not saying that this is the only true solution.
> 
> I admit that I do not use branch.*.merge and I do not know what
> people find lacking in what Santi did in late September with
> commit 5372806.  What problem are we trying to solve (not a
> rhetorical question -- I am truly lost here)?  Is it only a
> confusion between remote and local, or is there something that
> cannot be expressed with the current scheme?

More or less, yes.

When this thread started, I remembered being bitten exactly by this issue. And I only understood my problem after looking and trying to understand the code. Therefore, it was quite easy to come up with this patch.

IMHO, a problem really is the people do not want to read documentation. They see the branch.*.merge option in .git/config, and try to build their own mental model how it works.

Perhaps the warning I added now would have been enough for me to see my error; it points at the misconfigured option. For sure, I would have looked up the manual for the meaning of this option after seeing the warning. But the previous documentation simply was way to short.

Should I send a "simplified" patch?