Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 15, 2006, 21:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7virhgjt25.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <87velgs9hx.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> writes:

> So there's this goofy circular notion that people end up with
> If we fix it so that a local merge really is performed with
> "git merge <branch>" instead of "git pull . <branch>" then teaching
> pull=fetch+merge really is a lot easier.

I am wondering if that could be "git merge <committish>..." instead. I do not care too much about the ... part (i.e. an Octopus), but I often find myself doing:

	git checkout next
        git merge "Merge early part of branch 'foo'" HEAD foo~3

when earlier part of "foo" topic are worthy to be in 'next' but not the later ones.

> In the meantime, pull would still be useless to me, I think. But maybe
> that's just the "default branch to merge" selection being broken.

Have you looked into per-branch configuration for default merge source recently? It might not be documented well enough, though, because I do not use it myself, but you should be able to improve on that (meaning both documentation and setting up the defaults upon cloning and fetching).