From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2011 01:48:46 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] Add support for merging from upstream by default.
Message-ID: <20110209014846.GC24346@elie>
In-Reply-To: <7vpqr2oyy3.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

>> Could you give an example of breakage this configurability is designed
>> to prevent?
>
> I think there is no "prevent" or "breakage"; the patch is to give people a
> way to turn the feature on; without the configuration, "git merge" will
> keep the traditional behaviour, no?

Yes.  One answer to my question is that a person might try

	git fetch git://some/random/repository branch
	git merge

and at least for now it seems sensible to make that error out by
default rather than doing something unexpected.

In other words, another possible rule is "default to the last fetched
branch" (FETCH_HEAD), so the intent behind running "git merge" without
a branchname for the first time is not as obvious as I would hope.