Re: Newbie grief

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 4, 2012, 20:45 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s0DwRZT2yEWVh89LeVPU1seu+SJwEdt-jy=4gssCedegg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v4nrvadzq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:27 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 28 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:13 PM, Rich Pixley <rich.pixley@palm.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>>  $ # ...do some work...
>>>  $ hg push # assume this collides
>>
>> % git push
>>
>>>  pushing to $uri_for_cache_repo
>>>  searching for changes
>>>  abort: push creates new remote head 6d2eb0a6a278!
>>>  (you should pull and merge or use push -f to force)
>>>  $ hg push -f # the pull and merge case parallels git, so let's use push -f.
>>
>> This is stupid, why make everybody else's life difficult? Let's merge here.
>
> Doing "hg push -f" _regularly_ is probably stupid, but you need to step
> back a bit.  There is a valid situation where you may sometimes want to
> publish unmerged work for others to see.
>
> The person who is trying to push here may be quite junior, and may not be
> yet familiar with the areas of the project outside what he has worked on.
> In his attempt to "pull and then push", he can end up having to resolve a
> merge conflict that he is not capable of handling correctly. Regardless of
> the VCS used, you would want to give a way to this junior developer to ask
> for help "here is my work; while I was working on it, the baseline has
> been diverged greatly and I need help either merging it or rebasing it."

Sure, but is 'push -f' the right solution? If a junior really has no idea about what he is doing, I wouldn't want him pushing another 'head' to the master branch. Can mercurial really do a rebase only on a specific head of a branch? Even if mercurial can do that, the result can be quite messy; one guy doing a rebase, another guy doing a merge, another guy doing a different merge, another a different rebase; if they know what they are doing, they will avoid 'push -f' and revert or rebase their changes when they notice somebody else tried to do something similar, but maybe one of them is a slightly more advanced junior and actually does 'push -f', and we go into yet another round of conflict resolving.

It doesn't matter how you look at it; 'push -f' is not ideal.

In the git world there's many ways to resolve this; push to another branch, push to another repo, allow ssh access to your machine, send the changes by mail, copy the git repo to a shared location, etc. *All* of those alternatives are better than 'push -f'.

It seems to me that this *huge* thread basically boils down to Rich wanting 'hg push -f', when clearly that just creates problems, even in mercurial.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras