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

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Sep 9, 2013, 21:34 UTC
Message-ID: <FE7D06F70ABF477DA271A6A596C1F1E9@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <20130909205349.GA15506@sigill.intra.peff.net>

From: "Jeff King" <peff@peff.net>
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 9:53 PM

Show 38 quoted lines

> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 10:50:31PM +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:
>
>> John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:
>>
>> > I think we need to make sure that we give instructions for how to 
>> > go
>> > back if the default hasn't done what you wanted.  Something like 
>> > this:
>> >
>> >     Your pull did not fast-forward, so Git has merged '$upstream' 
>> > into
>> >     your branch, which may not be correct for your project.  If you
>> >     would rather rebase your changes, run
>> >
>> >         git rebase
>> >
>> >     See "pull.mode" in git-config(1) to suppress this message in 
>> > the
>> >     future.
>>
>> Sounds good to me. One option is to display the warning on the
>> command-line, and another option is to show it in COMMIT_EDITMSG 
>> (since
>> we now default to showing it even for non-conflicted merges).
>
> I hadn't though of that, but showing it in COMMIT_EDITMSG is a great
> moment, because you are notifying the user _before_ they create a 
> merge
> commit. So the backout/switch procedure is "cancel this by giving an
> empty message, then re-run git pull --rebase".
>
> On the other hand, if we run into conflicts, you'd probably want to 
> let
> them know before asking them to resolve them all. So perhaps a 
> separate
> message would be needed for that case (to suggest "reset --merge && 
> git
> pull --rebase").

In fact this [running into conflicts unexpectedly] is usually my use case, which I mis-described as a no-ff in an earlier reply.

Usually I'd want a clean rebase before submitting patches, but I can see other uses cases where there is a desire that branches show where they started so rebase wouldn't be appropriate.

It should not be necessary to give prescriptions about how to backout of a difficult corner, rather give details about how to go forward after stopping safely and early. The urge to press on (various proposals) may not be the right thing.

Philip