Re: [PATCH] pull: conflict hint pull.rebase suggestion should offer "merges" vs "true"

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 28, 2023, 14:13 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s1_Oy8GzoALnvQMJEVRkDB3EBmn4drTyY6T+9BatRpjUA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPMMpogFAR6cvcR8T5fx+AoytAJ7TsPpSeOjHNzW4Gmkuq7FLQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 7:33 AM Tao Klerks <tao@klerks.biz> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 4:22 AM Alex Henrie <alexhenrie24@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> > Now, this is not to say that there's no room for improvement. I like
> > the rebase=merges option and I wish everyone knew about it because
> > there are situations where it really is the best option. I suggest
> > leaving the existing text alone, but adding an additional paragraph,
> > something like:
> >
> > Note that --rebase or pull.rebase=true will drop existing merge
> > commits and rebase all of the commits from all of the merged branches.
> > If you want to rebase but preserve existing merge commits, use
> > --rebase=merges or pull.rebase=merges instead.
>
> My primary motivation with this pull request is to reduce the
> incidences, out there in the world, of people copy-pasting "git config
> pull.rebase true" into their command-line, and causing themselves
> major headaches days or weeks later. The "--rebase=interactive" part
> is secondary (to my concerns), because it's much less copy-pastable.

That's because the whole approach to the pull.rebase configuration is wrong. I explained why multiple times in countless discussions and git developers did not listen.

What we need is a pull.mode configuration that is *orthogonal* to pull.rebase, then everything just works.

For example, you could have this configuration.

    git config pull.mode merge
    git config pull.rebase merges

Then doing `git pull --rebase` would do a merges rebase.

This is not possible with the current approach, which I objected to.

Then there's no problem with telling the users to do pull.mode=rebase (or whatever), since that doesn't override pull.rebase=merges.

I programmed and explained this precise interaction with rebase=merges more than two years ago [1], but nobody listened. For an example of how such configuration would look like, see the patches I just sent [2].

Cheers.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20201218211026.1937168-14-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20230228140236.4175835-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/T/#t

-- 
Felipe Contreras