Re: [PATCH 0/2] advise about force-pushing as an alternative to reconciliation

From: Alex Henrie <alexhenrie24@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 3, 2023, 16:26 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMMLpeTDqABQij5=h5aaJT4auCoKzhX7LEX02bxRFn=YtCPZfw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <c3c36f93-3fc5-7f7d-1c24-e6925729cc96@gmail.com>

On Mon, Jul 3, 2023 at 9:33 AM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> On 02/07/2023 21:08, Alex Henrie wrote:
> > Many times now, I have seen novices do the following:
> >
> > 1. Start work on their own personal topic branch
> > 2. Push the branch to origin
> > 3. Rebase the branch onto origin/master
> > 4. Try to push again, but Git says they need to pull
> > 5. Pull and make a mess trying to reconcile the older topic branch with
> >     the rebased topic branch
> >
> > Help avoid this mistake by giving advice that mentions force-pushing,
> > rather than assuming that the user always wants to do reconciliation.
>
> I don't think we want to be advising users to force push. For the case
> you mention above I think it would be much safer to advise them to use
>
>         git push --force-if-includes
>
> In the absence of background fetches even
>
>         git push --force-with-lease
>
> is still safer than
>
>         git push --force

Hi Phillip, thanks for the feedback. --force-with-lease would be fine. I'll make that change in v2.

Regarding your other suggestion, --force-if-includes doesn't do anything unless --force-with-lease is also specified, and I think recommending that users always type --force-with-lease --force-if-includes is a bit much to ask of them. It also could lead to confusion if the user has decided to delete the local branch and start over, and is now trying to push the new local branch over the old one on the remote.

-Alex