Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Oct 24, 2007, 22:51 UTC
Message-ID: <B3A195E0-84E7-4844-B939-98BC352C91A1@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <20071024223815.GN29830@fieldses.org>

On Oct 25, 2007, at 12:38 AM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 12:33:37AM +0200, Steffen Prohaska wrote:
>> Maybe. I know git quite well now and in a shared workflow "git pull"
>> with auto-fast-forward would help me. I often need to run "for each
>> local branch: git checkout ; git merge" to get rid of the errors
>> reported by "git push".
>
> Hm.  There's gotta be more efficient ways to do that.  Maybe "git  
> push .
> origin/branch:branch" for each local "branch"?
>
> But I'm still a little confused why you don't just want to "git push
> name-of-branch" and avoid the whole problem.

There are two points:

- The current implementation of "git push" creates a remote branch
   if it does not yet exist. I want a safety net: "git push" only pushes
   if the remote branch already exists. In a sense "git push" is safer
   than "git push branch-with-typo". I use "git push branchname"
   exclusively for _creating_ new branches on the remote.

- Sometimes I updated two local branches and want to push. "git push"
   just works.

I started to believe that "git push" should always do the right thing. Maybe it is not possible, but actually "git push" always does the right thing for me if I ignore the error messages about local branches that need merging. I tend to merge all such branches right away, although it is a bit of a hassel. Otherwise, there will be a day I'll miss an important error.

What concerns me more is how to explain the behaviour to others. Right now, I can't tell them that "git push" just works but need to go into a lot of details.

	Steffen