Re: [PATCH 10/10] push: teach push to be quiet if local ref is strict subset of remote ref

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Oct 30, 2007, 10:53 UTC
Message-ID: <49830F09-FFBF-4195-9D12-ED7B7F56A142@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <472706DB.1040106@op5.se>

On Oct 30, 2007, at 11:26 AM, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Steffen Prohaska wrote:
>> My strange rule 10/10 adds a check that verifies if the local
>> side has something interesting to push. Only in this case a
>> pull make sense. If you do not have something new, a pull will
>> be a fast-forward, and just a waste of time.
>
> Err... fast-forward pulls are not a waste of time. What a strange
> notion. Perhaps I misunderstood, but this sentence jumped out at
> me and immediately got filed under "decidedly odd".

If the local branch is a strict ancestor, a pull is only interesting if you want to start to work on such a branch locally. But pull is a waste of time if you're only goal is to push. Push suggests to pull first. So you pull; and then you push again; and the result on the remote is the same. Only the error message is gone that could have been avoided in the first place. -> waste of time.

If you _pull_ it would be interesting to learn that you probably want to merge to more than the current local branch. At that time you expressed the intention to integrate new changes from the remote. And it's probably a good idea to integrate changes on all local branches that are set up to automatically merge from the same remote you just pulled.

But if you push you want to push. You'd probably only interested in pulls that add immediate value to the push. That is if the result of a subsequent push modified the remote.

	Steffen