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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 31, 2007, 21:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7vlk9jgeee.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <B16F7DA1-E3E5-47A4-AFD3-6680741F38F1@zib.de>

Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> You forgot a lot more important part.  Pushing into publishing
>> repositories.  And the discussion is about git-push command.
>
> Exactly, here are two examples:
>
> If you push only to publishing repositories that are read
> only by others, you'll never encounter the problem that
> 10/10 tried to solve. The publishing repository is never
> changed by others. You are the only one who pushes to this
> repository. Therefore the remote never advances unexpectedly.

Wrong.

People can and do work from more than one private repositories (I do). In a sense, that is sharing the repository with oneself.

I may do an emergency patch to fix breakage on 'maint' (and 'maint' only) from a location that is not my primary development box and push the fix out. I fully expect that the push will push out 'maint' and expect the other branches such as 'master' on the remote side to stay the same, as I haven't touched 'master' on that box for quite a while and it is now stale. In that situation, I _want_ the "git push" itself to report failure to notify me that it did not push what _I_ asked it to push out, so that I can be reminded that I'd better do "git push $remote maint" the next time. In the meantime, even though it reports a failure, 'master' on the remote side is _not_ updated, so the behaviour is still _safe_.

> Another difference is the way changes are integrated. In
> a workflow without shared repositories, only pull is used
> for integration, while push in only used for publishing the
> changes.

Wrong. push is a mirror of fetch and does not do _any_ integration. It is just a safe (because it insists on fast-forward) propagation mechanism. Your integration still happens with pull (actually, shared repository people seem to prefer "fetch + rebase" over "pull" which is "fetch + merge").

Show 7 quoted lines

> This is different if you work with a shared repository. Bob
> checks out the shared branch foo to his local branch bar and
> later he needs to push bar back to the shared branch foo. Bob
> needs to push changes from his local branch bar to the branch
> foo in the remote repository, a branch with a different name.
> This need does not emerge when working with two publishing
> repositories, as described above.

So you do "git push $remote bar:foo". If you do that regulary, there are configuration mechanisms to help you reduce your keyboard wear. What's the problem?