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

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

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:25 PM, Felipe Contreras
<felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>>
>>> It would be a *horrible* mistake to make "rebase" the default, because
>>> it's so much easier to screw things up that way.
>>>
>>> That said, making "no-ff" the default, and then if that fails, saying
>>>
>>>    The pull was not a fast-forward pull, please say if you want to
>>> merge or rebase.
>>>    Use either
>>>
>>>         git pull --rebase
>>>         git pull --merge
>>>
>>>    You can also use "git config pull.merge true" or "git config
>>> pull.rebase true"
>>>    to set this once for this project and forget about it.
>>>
>>> That way, people who want the existing behavior could just do that
>>>
>>>     git config pull.merge true
>>>
>>> once, and they'd not even notice.
>>>
>>> Hmm? Better yet, make it per-branch.
>>
>> I would assume that "no-ff" above was meant to be "--ff-only" from
>> the first part of the message.
>>
>> I also would assume that I can rephrase that setting pull.merge
>> (which does not exist) as setting pull.rebase explicitly to false
>> instead (i.e. missing pull.rebase and pull.rebase that is explicitly
>> set to false would mean two different things).
>>
>> I have to think about this a bit to convince myself that the message
>> is clear enough and useful for those this updated behaviour is
>> trying to help.  After reading the above message three times, I
>> still cannot shake the impression that we are just covering our
>> backside to be able to say "we told you already and you chose
>> poorly", in case things go wrong for them later.
>
> FWIW this is the message Mercurial users get (and they often say
> Mercurial's UI makes more sense):
>
> pushing to /tmp/foo
> searching for changes
> abort: push creates new remote head 77eafc4313d5!
> (you should pull and merge or use push -f to force)

Er, that's for push, but I don't see why something small like that
wouldn't make sense:

The pull was not fast-forward, please either merge or rebase.

-- 
Felipe Contreras