Re: [PATCH] push: mention "git pull" in error message for non-fast forwards

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 2, 2010, 19:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20100802191211.GA2180@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <1280756564-3932-1-git-send-email-Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr>

Hi Matthieu,

Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> +++ b/builtin/push.c
> @@ -130,8 +130,8 @@ static int push_with_options(struct transport *transport, int flags)
>  
>  	if (nonfastforward && advice_push_nonfastforward) {
>  		fprintf(stderr, "To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected\n"
> -				"Merge the remote changes before pushing again.  See the 'Note about\n"
> -				"fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help' for details.\n");
> +				"Merge the remote changes (e.g. 'git pull') before pushing again.  See the\n"
> +				"'Note about fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help' for details.\n");

Your change is good.

This reminds me: sometimes people blindly “git pull” a rebased history just to avoid a non-fast-forward push, and it irks me to no end. So if I were running the world, the output would be:

 error: rejected non-fast-forward push to '<url>'
 hint: To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates are
 hint: rejected by default.
 hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help'
 hint: for details.

and the relevant section of the manual would explain that

 1. if upstream is ahead of you, you may want to "git pull"

but

 2. if upstream rebased, you may want to "git pull --rebase", and
    yell at upstream a little while at it.

and

 3. if the history you are pushing to is both (1) known to be unstable
    and (2) wrong, you can override it with
    "git push <remote> +<refspec>".  Be sure to make sure the
    “[receive] denyNonFastForwards” setting is unset correctly in this
    case.

Jonathan