Re: [PATCH v3 17/21] switch: no implicit dwim, use --guess to dwim

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Mar 15, 2019, 08:19 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cQPMZhd-JSxD4Z6pL19qB1bFNu+EvPDh0vADpcaJ0tbqw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20190313183604.GA27503@esm>

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 2:36 PM Eckhard Maaß <eckhard.s.maass@googlemail.com> wrote:

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> On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 04:57:48PM +0700, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:
> > Similar to automatic detach, this behavior could be confusing because
> > it can sometimes create a new branch without a user asking it to,
> > especially when the user is still not aware about this feature.
> >
> > In the future, perhaps we could have a config key to disable these
> > safety nets and let 'switch' do automatic detach or dwim
> > again. But that will be opt-in after the user knows what is what. For
> > now give a short option if you want to use it often.
>
> As I am late to the patch series (sorry!), has there been already any
> discussion on that? In my experience, people get confused with detached
> HEAD state quite often, whereas the automatic creation of a local branch
> is no problem.

This statement does a good job of articulating my (unspoken) response to this patch. Whereas a detached HEAD might be scary and confusing to newcomers, and difficult for them to recover from, automatic creation of a DWIM'd local branch doesn't seem so problematic (if at all).

With git-checkout, it's very easy to accidentally get into a detached HEAD state, so it makes some sense to protect newcomers, by default, from that accident in git-switch. However, auto-creation of a new local branch is not, for a couple reasons, nearly so weighty a matter. First, in many cases it may be less likely to happen since it requires presence of a corresponding remote tracking branch. Second, it's intuitively easy to recover from it: when git-switch reports that it created a new branch, though perhaps surprising, the user would naturally know to look for a command to "delete a branch".

And, unlike a detached HEAD, which newcomers may mistakenly believe lead to irretrievable loss of work, an unexpected branch creation carries no such penalty, perceived or real.

Show 5 quoted lines

> So if it is deemed to be too confusing to dwim in this
> case, could we add a hint suggesting the command? Something like:
> "No suitable branch <foo> found, however there is a remote tracking
> branch <origin/foo> that you can siwtch and create with `git switch
> --guess foo`" (or maybe the one without guess)?

That could be helpful if git-switch continues to make --no-guess the default, but making --guess the default (as it is in git-checkout) would likely be even better (for the reasons enumerated above).