Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

We do that for Wine. The problem is that we recommend using git-rebase to make it easier for occasional developers to keep a clean history, and rebase and pull interfere badly.

The result is that we recommend always using fetch+rebase to keep up to date, but this is confusing many people too, because git-fetch appears to do a lot of work yet leaves the working tree completely unchanged, and git-rebase doesn't do anything (since in most cases they don't have commits to rebase) but has an apparently magical side-effect of updating the working tree.

Ideally it should be possible to have git-rebase do the right thing even if the branch has been merged into; then we could tell people to always use git-pull, and when they get confused by seeing merges in their history have them do a git-rebase to clean things up.