Re: [PATCH] Switch receive.denyCurrentBranch to "refuse"

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 1, 2009, 23:56 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr62hr9s9.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0902012349360.3586@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> at the cost of annoying
>
> - a few oldtimers
> - now, instead of later

Nobody seems to have realized this, but suddenly changing the default to refuse without giving people enough advance warning to adjust will hurt not just the old-timers (a rough definition is people who are from the kernel circle and have been using git since summer of 2005), but people who picked up a recipe from various how-to web pages to push to a live repository and updating the checkout that is otherwise never touched by the humans with its post-update hook running "reset --hard". Old timers may be savvy enough to know what has changed and may be able to grudgingly react, but what is your plans for these recipe following kids?

How many times do I have to repeat that it is much worse to break a working setup of people without advance warning and sound transition guidance than having a known breakage that users can be trained to avoid?

And realize that I am not saying we need to keep the known breakage forever.

The only thing I am saying is that you need to have a smooth transition plan for changing the default, and a mechanism to guide people in place.

I'll ignore you if you keep repeating "all it takes is for old timers to flip a switch". Such an argument shows that you didn't learn a thing after the 1.6.0 fallout.