Re: [PATCH] doc: pull: fix rebase=false documentation

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2021, 16:54 UTC
Message-ID: <60faf46153f62_defb208aa@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <9cb70776-8684-9d1e-e4c5-188c6c19fdc7@iee.email>

Philip Oakley wrote:

Show 37 quoted lines

> On 23/07/2021 08:30, Jeff King wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 08:24:25PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> >
> >> I'm not trashing the current behavior, I'm explaining what the consensus
> >> is. I spent several man-days re-reading old threads, and this is the
> >> consensus of what should happen:
> >>
> >>   1. git pull              # merge HEAD into upstream
> >>   2. git pull origin topic # merge topic into HEAD
> >>
> >> Of the people that expressed an opinion, 100% of them stated that what
> >> `git pull` does in the first case today is not desirable.
> > I did not participate in the threads you linked earlier, so I am
> > probably not in that 100%. But you did use my name below:
> >
> >> Yes, you are correct that if *everyone* followed the topic branch
> >> workflow, everything would work correctly, but that's not what happens
> >> in reality, in reality people do all kinds of workflows, and wrong
> >> merges are pervasive.
> >>
> >> Everyone--including Linus, Jeff, and you--agree that there's two
> >> different ways of using `git pull`: integrator versus developer.
> >>
> >> When a user is doing `git pull` to synchronize changes to push to the
> >> same branch, that's a centralized two-way workflow, so he is acting both
> >> as an integrator and as a developer, and it's in that particular case
> >> that the order of the parents should be reversed. Everyone agrees on
> >> that.
> >>
> >> When the user the opposite explicitely: `git pull origin master`
> >> Linus calls it a "back-merge" [1], and in that case the order of the
> >> parents should not be reversed.
> > So I feel compelled to say now that I do not think that changing the
> > order of parents for "git pull" is the obviously correct thing to do.
> While I never `pull` because it's not right for me as a 'contributor', I
> do agree that the default 'maintainer' view of `pull` will need to be
> retained for long term backward compatibility.

Of course, but a maintainer never does `git pull` to merge a pull request, she does `git pull github/john topic`, does she not?

Nobody was in favor of reversing the parents in the case of `git pull $where $what`, that would be the wrong thing to do.

So the maintainer view of `git pull` would remain fine.

> What I have rarely seen in the discussion is explanation that is based
> on workflow style, though the potential `update` command (1) may break
> some of the deadlock about the direction of 'pull requests', and
> possibly confusion regarding the location of the 'golden' publish repo.

I think that's because most of the people that follow a workflow don't have this problem.

It's only newcomers that don't follow any workflow that are hit by this. Another name for this no-workflow is trunk-based development [1]. Essentially everyone pulls and pushes to the same branch.

People that use topic branches don't need `git update`, people who follow trunk-based development do.

> (1) there are a lot of 'update' commands floating about, esp on Git for
> Windows. If there is a suitably named `update` command to do the `pull
> --contributor` merge-ff swap then many of the issues could fade away.

Indeed. And at least when I was maintaining my git-fc fork, people did enjoy my implementation of `git update`.

[1] https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

-- 
Felipe Contreras