Re: Pushing into a repository with working directory?

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jan 5, 2007, 19:36 UTC
Message-ID: <20070105193646.GC8753@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vwt41j1le.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> writes:
> 
> > Special casing the 'current' branch makes any sort of automated push
> > setup unreliable.  Indeed the special case preventing a fetch into the
> > current branch is pretty annoying for the same reason.  I would almost
> > prefer to relax that than add the same for push.
> 
> How would you relax the fetch case?  Fetching into the current
> branch, unless the repository is bare, is always a fishy
> operation.

And so is pushing into the current branch, so long as the current branch has a working directory attached to it.

Most new users to Git expect to be able to push into the current branch of a repository and `just have it work`. Only they don't really seem to have an idea of _how_ that operation should behave, which means they really don't want it to work at all. I certainly don't want an operation to succeed if I can't reason about what its success means!

Right now pushing into the current branch makes the index become way out of sync from HEAD. This causes git-runstatus to display a large number of differences, basically undoing any of the changes introduced by HEAD@{1}..HEAD. The user is left with a dirty working tree that they can commit - and committing it will just revert the prior commits. The user will later cuss at Git for losing their changes. Not pretty.

-- 
Shawn.