Re: [PATCH v4] merge: new autosetupmerge option 'simple' for matching branches

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 20, 2022, 17:43 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqczhbr6pv.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <CAPMMpogY5vZU8gyRSYh+BM4goPPtJw0cCiM-31sy-s_uGRv8uA@mail.gmail.com>

Tao Klerks <tao@klerks.biz> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> However, I
>> wonder how users for whom this may be useful are going to discover this
>> option? I don't expect that such users are going to be watching Git's
>> release notes looking for new features such as this, or carefully
>> reading documentation changes.
>
> Honestly, I was being a bit selfish here - I effectively control the
> gitconfig of "my" users, so I was planning on enabling this by default
> and letting it "settle in" in git at large, eventually proposing to
> change the default.

I am afraid that it is double disservice to your users. Once they graduate your organization, they notice that their Git does not work as they expect and puzzled.

Show 12 quoted lines

> ...
> To choose either option permanently, see push.default in 'git help config'.
> ---
>
> I would propose to add one sentence at the end along the lines of:
> ---
> To instead avoid automatically configuring upstream branches when
> their name doesn't match the local branch, see option 'simple' of
> branch.autosetupmerge in 'git help config'.
> ---
>
> Does that make sense to you?

Two questions.

 - If a user follows the push.default advice, does it have any
   advantage to set branch.autosetupmerge=simple at all?

 - If a user follows the branch.autosetupmerge=simple advice, what
   happens their "git push" on a branch that the .merge is not set
   due to this configuration?  Shouldn't they have to set up the
   push.default for these branches anyway?

While it might be a good thing to mention branch.autosetupmerge configuration variable, I am not sure if "To instead avoid" is a good thing to say here. It sounds as if the user can ignore push.default as long as branch.autosetupmerge is taken care of, but I suspect that is not the case. Setting the latter to 'simple' means there are *MORE* branches that do not have .remote/.merge set up, doesn't it? Which in turn means that we are relying more on what push.default is set to, right?