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

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:16:01 +0200

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
>> Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>>>
>>>> If I were to suggest any improvements, it'd be to change the 
>>>> semantics of git-pull to always update the local branches set up to 
>>>> be merged with the remote tracking branches when they, prior to 
>>>> fetching, pointed to the same commit, such that when
>>>>
>>>> $ git show-ref master
>>>> d4027a816dd0b416dc8c7b37e2c260e6905f11b6 refs/heads/master
>>>> d4027a816dd0b416dc8c7b37e2c260e6905f11b6 refs/remotes/origin/master
>>>>
>>>> refs/heads/master gets set to refs/remotes/origin/master post-fetch.
>>> In general, this should fail.  Because you are expected to have local 
>>> changes in the local branches.
>>
>> BS argument.
> 
> Aha.  So you want to make sure that the local branches are no longer 
> "purely" local.  And you want to stop updating them when unpushed changes 
> are in the local branches.
> 

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.

> Seems I cannot help you.

Well, I knew that much from the start so I didn't ask you to, and since 
you seem to fail to grasp what I had in mind, I'm sure you'd botch the 
implementation anyway. Thanks for not quite offering though ;-)

I'm sure you'll review the patch though, and I'm equally sure I will 
appreciate your technical comments rather a lot more than this current 
bickering about a feature it seems I can't express clearly enough in words.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231