Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 22, 2007, 23:21 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0710230017120.25221@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <1193081785.4522.181.camel@cacharro.xalalinux.org>

Hi,

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 17:16 +0200, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
> > To me, it's more along the lines of "let git help me not make the 
> > mistake of hacking on a six-week old codebase when I've explicitly asked 
> > it to merge these and those remote tracking branches into these and 
> > those local branches". Not updating those branches when there *are* 
> > changes on them is something users can understand and will probably also 
> > appreciate, but the reason for not allowing even fast-forwards escape me.
> 
> I'd love this behavior, FWIW.
> 
> The "branches should not track their origin by default" seems suited
> only to Linux kernel maintainers who frequently pull from many different
> people, not to "random hacker who wants to keep track of a project he
> doesn't maintain" :)

The problem I see here is not that the kernel folks would suffer, but that the behaviour would not be easy to explain. Which is a sure way to not only give people rope, but put their heads in the noose.

Not having clear semantics is prone to lead to misunderstandings, and mistakes.

IOW while I trust you when you say it would make things easier for you, I am quite certain it would make things much harder for a substantial part of the rest of humanity.

Ciao, Dscho