RE: Pull is Evil (was: Re: A failing attempt to use Git in a centralized environment)

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 30, 2014, 16:47 UTC
Message-ID: <536129068cc28_1404fdd310fd@nysa.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <536106EA.5090204@xiplink.com>

Marc Branchaud wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> But I'm definitely biased because I think pull is pretty much broken:
> 
> * New users are encouraged to use pull, but all too often the default
> fetch-then-merge behaviour doesn't match their expectations and they end up
> starting threads like this one on the mailing list.

Yes, this has been discussed many times in the past, and everyone agrees the default behavior is not correct.

Most people agree it has to be changed.

And we have patches for it[1].

But it's not going to change. Why? No reason given, it's just not going to.

> * If we change pull's default behaviour, we'll just be shifting the
> mismatched expectations onto the other half of the new users who would be
> happy with fetch-then-merge.

Not true. As it has been agreed in the discussions, very few people would be affected negatively by this change, and even then an appropriate error message like:

  The pull was not fast-forward, please either merge or rebase.
  If unsure, run 'git pull --merge'.

Should do the trick.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/247567

-- 
Felipe Contreras