Re: [PATCH 0/4] doc: git-pull: clarify DESCRIPTION section

From: D. Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 24, 2025, 19:56 UTC
Message-ID: <CALnO6CBh_dcbZuSEebG28eQ+N1KfxzEuOp9uxsWEjBQ3Ci1ZYA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <pull.1976.git.1758656702.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 3:45 PM Julia Evans via GitGitGadget <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> wrote:

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>
> I got feedback from 15 Git users on the current git pull man page, using
> this tool: https://text-feedback.wizardzines.com/git-pull.
>
> My goals here are to be clear about the relationship between git pull and
> fetch/merge/rebase etc, make sure users know the current default for git
> pull (--ff-only) since some folks still remember the old default, and to
> help users quickly figure out what command they need to run to
> merge/rebase/squash/etc.

Huh! I thought pull would merge divergent histories by default, and even now it's hard to extract that info from the manual (the first paragraph actually mentions reconciliation via --rebase/--no-rebase, but I thought --no-rebase was still the default). TIL, thanks!

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> I've taken a pretty aggressive approach because I think it's possible to
> have a pretty short and focused DESCRIPTION section here while keeping the
> most important info. Open to hearing that I've removed too much.
>
> This references the UPSTREAM BRANCHES section from
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/0ec629d4037bf5d1ccc248ca1bbd87ccc08119a3.1757703309.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/
> , so if that isn't merged I'll need to revisit the approach here.

A common way to handle this is to build your topic on top of the topic you depend on, and then mention that in your cover letter. I'm not sure how GitGitGadget handles that, though, since with format-patch you could then specify to send patches only from <other-topic>..<this-topic>. So I think this is probably ok?

-- 
D. Ben Knoble