Re: [PATCH 0/2] Feeding an annotated but unsigned tag to "git merge"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 6, 2012, 13:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20120606134207.GB2597@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1338926312-4239-1-git-send-email-gitster@pobox.com>

On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 12:58:30PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> This two-patch series further loosens the definition by considering
> that an annotated but unsigned tag can be fast-forwarded as long as
> it points at a commit that can be fast-forwarded to.  So
> 
>         $ git merge anno
>         $ git merge --ff anno
> 
> will now fast-forward (note that this will *not* happen for signed
> tags).
> 
> I find this change somewhat iffy myself, as we are encouraging
> people to lose information (i.e. the contents of the annotated tag
> is no longer recorded in the history) and some may see it as a
> regression in the post 1.7.10 world because of that.
> 
> But since I've written it already, I thought it might be worth
> showing it to the list for discussion, if only to publicly reject
> the idea ;-).

It has been nearly a day, and nobody has publicly rejected it. So I will do so. :)

This just doesn't make sense to me. Why would we treat annotated but unsigned tags differently from signed tags? In both cases, the new behavior is keeping more information about what happened, which is generally a good thing.

I haven't seen any good argument against creating these merges[1]. But even if there was one, I don't think "signed versus unsigned" is necessarily the right distinguishing feature. It is probably more about per-project or per-user preferences (e.g., "my project does not want too many merges, because it makes our history less pretty"). And in that case, something like a config flag would be a better option (not that I am not saying that such a flag is a good idea, only that it might be less bad than this).

-Peff

[1] From the tone of your message, I think you are not the right person
    to be arguing that side, anyway. It sounds as though you are not all
    that invested in this series. :)