Subject: Re: git pull opinion

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:54:23 +0100

Bill Lear wrote:
> On Monday, November 5, 2007 at 15:33:31 (-0800) Junio C Hamano writes:
>> Aghiles <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Is there an "easier" way to pull into a dirty directory ? I am
>>> asking this to make sure I understand the problem and not
>>> because I find it annoying to type those 4 commands to perform
>>> a pull (although some of my colleagues do find that annoying :).
>> You need to switch your mindset from centralized SVN workflow.
>>
>> The beauty of distributedness is that it redefines the meaning
>> of "to commit".  In distributed systems, the act of committing
>> is purely checkpointing and it is not associated with publishing
>> the result to others as centralized systems force you to.
>>
>> Stop thinking like "I need to integrate the changes from
>> upstream into my WIP to keep up to date."  You first finish what
>> you are currently doing, at least to the point that it is
>> stable, make a commit to mark that state, and then start
>> thinking about what other people did.  You may most likely do a
>> "git fetch" followed by "git rebase" to update your WIP on top
>> of the updated work by others.
>>
>> Once you get used to that, you would not have "a dirty
>> directory" problem.
> 
> I respectfully beg to differ.  I think it is entirely reasonable, and
> not a sign of "centralized" mindset, to want to pull changes others
> have made into your dirty repository with a single command.
> 

I find it much more convenient to just fetch them. I'd rather see
git-pull being given a --rebase option (which would ultimately mean
teaching git-merge about it) to rebase already committed changes on
top of the newly fetched tracking branch. It's being worked on, but
rather slowly.

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