Re: [PATCH 0/3] Reject non-ff pulls by default

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 11, 2013, 10:53 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s2dmn48T=c6aSLrWeTY=CKf5AYnAv7gA8bLjLMyb9-MTA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpq4n9tjd5z.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The problem is the newcomers, and the newcomers will most definitely
>> not activate a configuration option to tell them that they are doing
>> something potentially undesirable.
>
> I teach Git to 200 newcommers each year. All of them run "git pull" the
> first day, but believe me, very few of them want to know what a rebase
> is at that time.

And who says they have to? This is a straw man argument.

May of them don't want to know what the staging area is, that's why they run 'git commit --all', and just like that they can run 'git pull --merge'.

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>> By the time they learn about pull.mode, they probably already know
>> what a rebase is. So what is the point of the configuration in the
>> first place?
> [...]
>> That doesn't mean anything, you are assuming the user will do 'git
>> pull --rebase', and there's no rationale as to why they would end up
>> doing that.
>
> So, you insist in asking the user to chose between rebase and merge, but
> you also insist that they will not chose rebase? So, why ask?

Because as you said, they don't know what that is.

Show 8 quoted lines

>> 'git commit' by default "prevents" users from creating commits without
>> first adding changes to the staging area, and since it's a concept
>> unique to Git, it's fair to say that none of the newcomers understand
>> why 'git commit' is failing, the error messages is not particularly
>> useful either.
>
> I don't particularly agree that not defaulting to --all was a good idea,
> but that's another topic.

It the same topic, the project already made a choice, and precisely because of the same reasoning that 'git commit --all' is required, 'git pull --merge' should be required.

> But the error message is rather clear:
>
>   no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

And we can do the same:

"Read more with 'git pull --help' or do 'git pull --merge'."

-- 
Felipe Contreras