Re: first parent, commit graph layout, and pull merge direction

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>>>> Unless your primary user base is those who use Git as a deployment
>>>>> tool to always follow along the tip of some external repository
>>>>> without doing anything on your own on the branch you run your "git
>>>>> pull" on, defaulting it to --ff-only does not make much sense to me.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of people do stuff, but the rebase it.
>>>
>>> If I am parsing the above properly, I think that is only saying that
>>> "pull --rebase" makes sense for people who do real work, which I am
>>> not disagreeing.
>>
>> You claimed that 'git pull' (--ff-only) only makes sense if the
>> primary user-base doesn't do any work on it, but that's not true; they
>> can do a 'git rebase' after such pull (or a merge).
>
> Either you misread what I wrote or I was unclear.  I really meant
> "anything on your own *ON* THE BRANCH YOU RUN your "git pull" on".
> With
>
>         git checkout frotz ; git pull --ff-only
>
> you do not do anything "on frotz" other than following along.  You
> can of course commit, rebase and all others on other branches like
> xyzzy and push them out directly.  But you cannot even do this once
>
>         git checkout frotz; git merge xyzzy
>
> if you expect the next "git checkout frotz; git pull --ff-only" will
> keep working usefuly.

Unless you rebase. We could of course have a
'branch.<name>.allow_merge' configuration that gets automatically
turned on the first time a 'git merge' is executed, but I feel that
creates more inconsistency.

>> We don't have to assume our primary user-base wants to do full fledged
>> merges, in fact, such assumption would be wrong.
>
> I think we are in agreement on that point already.
>
> An assumption that people who do merges are somehow more well versed
> in Git and are more capable than others to configure their
> repository or they will not be annoyed if you asked them a single
> configuration change is also wrong, though.

s/people who do merges/people who should do merges/

And no, it's not wrong. People who do merges should know what they are doing.

The alternatives are these:

a) you annoy the vast majority of the user-base by making 'git pull' a
dangerous operation that should be avoided, and replaced with 'git
fetch'+'git rebase'.

b) you annoy a minority of the user-base by making 'git pull' not do
the merge the expected, so they have to do +'git merge' (which is
already less of a change than a)), or configure the default (which
they most likely are able to do, if they did intent to do a merge).

b) is clearly superior.

-- 
Felipe Contreras