Re: GIT vs Other: Need argument

Thanks for that detailed writeup. It squares pretty well with my understanding.

Junio C Hamano wrote:

I think this is actually the case I'd be most concerned about getting right for those people who are coming from svn and want to change their workflow as little as possible at first. The class of people who would exclusively use an "svnish-commit" alias that did "git commit;git push" -- that is, who never do local commits -- would always find themselves with this setup.

You are correct in pointing out later on that my fetch+rebase workflow fits this structure. And for my particular environment it's actually the only one I can use a lot of the time, because I'm usually pushing to a shared git-svn repository (or working in a git-svn repo of my own), from which the changes will get committed back to svn. Eric Wong has warned that git-svn doesn't deal well with merges; it expects linear history. So for now this is the structure I need to end up with, at least until git-svn learns how to deal with nonlinear ancestry, if that's even possible at all given svn's inherent limitations.

I look forward to the day when git has built up enough critical mass here that we can just switch over to it completely and ditch that kind of restriction. With that happy day in mind, I'd still love to see the other workflows made as painless as possible, so more comments below.

I wonder if it makes sense to automate that even more and make git pull behave a bit statefully like rebase does:

    $ git pull origin
    Stashing local changes.
    Resolving conflicts, pass 1.
    Conflicts! Please resolve.
    $ edit ; test
    $ git pull --continue
    Committing revision M.
    Unstashing your local changes.
    Resolving conflicts, pass 2.
    Local changes conflicted during roll-forward. Sort it out.
    $

When git pull --continue does the commit, it *might* be nice for it to do a variant of commit -a: if the user has modified all the conflicting files, *and* not done an update-index on any of them manually, then do the update-index implicitly. (That "and" part would be to prevent it from tripping up experienced git users who want to manually mark the conflicting files as resolved by running update-index.) I'm not sure that's actually a good idea, though it'd save some commands most of the time; the danger, of course, is that you could end up committing a half-resolved file by accident. But then I guess there's nothing preventing you from doing that with update-index today.

But that's attractive because it's exactly two git commands in the most complex case (conflicts in the merge of committed revisions) and only one git command in the simplest cases (no conflicts or conflicts only in the working copy edits.) In the case of no working copy edits, --continue would just do the commit for you.

To make pull and rebase even more consistent, one could also allow git pull --abort to roll back the pull during a conflict resolution, whether or not it's a working-copy-edits one. People might find that a handy shortcut in other workflows too; it would probably just do a hard reset back to the pre-merge revision in the no-working-copy-edits case. Obviously that wouldn't be new functionality, just an arguably slightly more intuitive way to do it than what exists now.

Actually I think I like the idea of making that a little more robust and having it take a --continue option like I described above. No reason it can't keep track of its current state. I will spend some time this weekend doing that.

-Steve