Re: [PATCH 0/6] Reroll of rr/triangular-push-fix

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 24, 2013, 08:12 UTC
Message-ID: <7vli60c4gu.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0kDwMq-ADRPShOdCy2Vh+zj9J9A0A4CFv21aKZFeiMs+w@mail.gmail.com>

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

> I hope (perhaps foolishly) to persuade you nevertheless. I fear that
> if this series solidifies before I get there, we'll be stuck with this
> stupid erroring-out behavior forever.

I do not think it is "stupid" at all.

'simple' is supposed to be an easy and safe default to help new people. Your original patch to change its semantics for the central workflow from the current 'make sure upstream is set and set to the same name' to 'anything goes' is making the mode more dangerous than the corresponding 'upstream'. Such a mode may have its place, but labelling such a mode with rough edges as 'simple' and forcing it on new people _is_ stupid, IMHO.

In any case, the good news is, if you start strict, and if it turns out to be stricter than necessary, it is easier to loosen it later, because nobody would be relying on an operation to _fail_.

If you start too loose without safety, however, it is a lot harder to tighten it later when it turns out that safety helps new people.

Since the beginning of this series, our working assumption for triangular-simple' has been that it can just turn into a straight 'current'. But given that 'simple' is supposed to be an easy and safe default for new people, I suspect that it should be a bit more strict.

For example, if you are on a random topic branch and say "git push", always pushing it out may not be a very sensible thing to do, and it might be safer if we restrict 'triangular-simple' to push out the current branch to the branch of the same name, but only when such a branch already exists at the remote end, or something.