Re: [PATCH v2] pull: introduce --merge option

From: Matthias Baumgarten <matthias.baumgarten@aixigo.com>
Date: Jul 28, 2021, 07:44 UTC
Message-ID: <9e8f1c87-cd08-e1a2-fd5d-713cb0590049@aixigo.com>
In-Reply-To: <610038c0e1056_8fd52084a@natae.notmuch>

On 7/27/21 6:48 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> Alex Henrie wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 2:45 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Alex Henrie <alexhenrie24@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Junio, would you be willing to accept adding -m without adding --merge also?
>>>
>>> My gut feeling is that "-m" without "--merge" in the context of
>>> "pull" is extremely unlikely to fly well.
>>>
>>> As "git pull" is a "git fetch" followed by a "git merge" (or "git
>>> rebase"), it takes the union of common command line options from
>>> both phases, and "git merge" takes "-m 'message'" which is an option
>>> fairly familiar to users (since it comes from "git commit").  Even
>>> if we are never going to pass "-m message" from "git pull" down to
>>> underlying "git merge", squatting on short and common "-m" would be
>>> a bad idea.
>>
>> Thanks for the explanation. I forgot that "-m" usually means
>> "message". That does seem like a good reason to not use "-m" for
>> "merge".
> 
> It means --merge plenty of times:
> 
>   * git restore -m
>   * git checkout -m
>   * git rebase -m
>   * git diff -m
>   * git read-tree -m
>   * git diff-tree -m

Add to Felipes list:

  * git switch -m

and maybe git cherry-pick -m where -m does not mean "merge" itself but is used to determine the parent of the merge (when picking merge commits) to base on.

Other examples of where -m has different meaning than merge:

  * git am -m (message-id)
  * git branch -m (move branch)

I would rephrase the question as to what would I expect `git pull -m` to do, if I had never heard of it before. In the case of fast-forwarding and rebasing trying to add a merge commit message with -m would not even make sense. Only in the case of trying to create a merge commit by issuing git pull this would make sense. So if we could agree on that being not the most used scenario, I think -m would be a great short option for --merge.

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