Re: git push (mis ?)behavior

From: Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com>
Date: Oct 3, 2007, 10:49 UTC
Message-ID: <20071003104943.GA3017@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <83C5420A-528A-43F0-AF8C-699B85B7AD95@wincent.com>

On 2007-10-03 12:25:22 +0200, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:

> In any case I think more people need to speak up on the topic so
> that we can find out what most people really think about changing
> the default.

My vote is for changing it.

Both "push the current branch" and "push all branches" have their uses, and both can be specified explicitly, so no problem there. The problem arises when a user expects one default but get another. There are two cases:

  1. "push the current branch" is the default, but the user intended
     to push all branches. She ends up pushing only a subset of what
     she wanted, which is easily fixed once she notices what's
     happened.

  2. "push all branches" is the default, but the user intended to push
     only the current branch. She ends up pushing a superset of what
     she wanted, which is not easily fixed if she can't be sure that
     no one else has pulled from the public repo before she notices
     what's happened.

So it all comes down to case (2) mistakes being much harder to fix than case (1) mistakes. Therefore, we should change the default, since doing so makes it safer.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle