Re: git pull suggestion

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 10, 2010, 04:35 UTC
Message-ID: <20100410043535.GA22481@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <i2y3abd05a91004091233nc11ee5f8m4f40e7451e02518a@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 03:33:35PM -0400, Aghiles wrote:

> It is another issue, but I feel that the 'dirty working directory' is
> one of the major usability hurdles for people migrating from svn
> and CVS (a git pull --merge-using-stash could address it, maybe).

I think this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find it in the archives.

It is probably a little bit confusing because your pull will not necessarily complete immediately. It may have conflicts, which you may fix up, or you may "git reset --hard" to abort. But either way, you need to remember that your dirty state was stashed and that you need to pull it out after it's all done.

I think we would do better to tell the user about stash there, so they can do it themselves. Then they know where their changes went and how to get them back. Since v1.6.5.5, this error message now says:

  Your local changes to '%s' would be overwritten by merge.  Aborting.
  Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge.

What version of git are you using? If you (or others you are helping) saw that message and it wasn't helpful, do you have any suggestions for how to improve it?

-Peff