Re: git push (mis ?)behavior

[Benoit SIGOURE <tsuna@lrde.epita.fr>]

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On Oct 3, 2007, at 12:25 PM, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:

> El 3/10/2007, a las 10:57, Miles Bader escribió:
>
>> To the extent that a command _is_ "dangerous", there's always a  
>> tradeoff
>> between convenience and "danger".  Some systems (e.g. those aimed at
>> newbies) might have as a goal to do the absolute minimum with every
>> command and always, always, err on the side of safety.  I don't  
>> think git
>> is that system.
>
> While much of this debate can be shortcircuited simply by making  
> the behaviour configurable, I would like to take you up on the  
> point that you raise here.
>
> If we're going to talk about what kind of system Git is then  
> consider this:
>
> - it's inherently distributed and this design actively encourages  
> users to treat their local repositories as sandboxes where things  
> are tried out, perfected, and then pushed out into the public via  
> one means or another
>
> - it's built from the ground up to be good at branching and  
> merging; this, combined with my previous point, means that users  
> are likely to have multiple heads and often some of them will be  
> "works in progress" that aren't yet ready for publication
>
> So it's in that light I see accidentally pushing more than you  
> thought you would as "dangerous"; when you make this mistake you're  
> basically making stuff available that's not yet ready for  
> consumption, and by its nature this mistake is basically  
> irreversible: you can't really "unpush" what you pushed, you can  
> only push out additional amendments which correct it.
>
> So, in this light, when you say:
>
>> What's "dangerous" for newbies, often ends up being what doesn't
>> correspond with their mental model.
>
> I don't know how much it has to do with mental models. I think in  
> this case it's a bit simpler than that where you make the mistake  
> once or twice and very quickly learn that "git push" means "push  
> what's in my repo", not "push only what's on my current branch".  
> It's a *very* easy lesson to learn if you get burnt and hardly  
> requires any adjustments to ones "mental model".
>
> I personally would be in favour of changing the default because I  
> tend to work on a particular branch at a time and then want to push  
> *that* out -- generally I'm thinking about one general area or one  
> task at a time, and that means one branch at a time; I almost never  
> think along the lines of getting all my branches into shape at once  
> and then pushing them out in a batch. I think this is more likely  
> to be a common pattern, although obviously that remains speculation  
> at this point.
>
> Changing the default would be great for people like me; by not  
> having to pass additional parameters to git-push I save some  
> keystrokes. If I ever want to push everything an "--all" switch  
> would do the job. But if people prefer to keep the old default then  
> there'll be .gitconfig for people like me. In any case I think more  
> people need to speak up on the topic so that we can find out what  
> most people really think about changing the default.
>

I completely second all that.  I've been using Git for roughly 3  
months and have been burnt the same way.

-- 
Benoit Sigoure aka Tsuna
EPITA Research and Development Laboratory



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