Re: Pull is Mostly Evil

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
To: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Pull is Mostly Evil
Date: Sat, 03 May 2014 04:18:03 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87wqe3wqp0.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 20140502214817.GA10801@sigill.intra.peff.net

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 02:11:05PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> > If we step back a bit, because we are forcing him to differentiate
>> > these two pulls in his mental model anyway, perhaps it may help
>> > people (both new and old) if we had a new command to make the
>> > distinction stand out more.  What if the command sequence were like
>> > this instead?
>> > 
>> >     $ git checkout maint
>> >     $ git update [ origin maint ]
>> > 
>> >     $ git pull [--no-ff] developer-remote topic-branch
>> >     $ git push [ origin maint ]
>> > 
>> > where the new command 'update' enforces the '--ff-only' update.  And
>> > then we would stop telling "'git pull' first" when a push does not
>> > fast-forward.
>> 
>> In addition to barf when it's not a fast-forward, such command can
>> switch the parents, so it appears 'maint' was merged to 'origin/maint'.
>> Many people have complained about this order.
>
> I realize this has veered off into talking about an "update" command,
> and not necessarily "pull", but since there a lot of proposals floating
> around, I wanted to make one point: if we are going to do such a switch,
> let's please make it something the user explicitly turns on.

A safety catch defaulting to a factory position of "off" is not going to
stop inexperienced people from shooting themselves in the foot.

-- 
David Kastrup