Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

[Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>]

On Oct 25, 2007, at 10:18 PM, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:
>
>> With that in mind, how about making "git checkout foo", after
>> foo is set up thusly, to show:
>> 	git log --pretty=oneline --left-right origin/pu...foo
>> if (and only if) they have diverged?  Then you can deal with the
>> staleness of local tracking fork 'foo' in any way you want.
>> You could even go one step further and make this "checkout foo",
>> in addition to or instead of showing the above left-right log,
>>  - automatically run "git merge origin/pu" if it is a
>>    fast-forward, and say it did _not_ run that merge if it is
>>    not a fast-forward;
>>  - automatically run "git merge origin/pu" always, even if it is
>>    not a fast-forward;
>>  - automatically run "git rebase origin/pu" always;
>> Would that make your life easier?
>
> That it would, except the confusion would then be that it's  
> automatically
> rebased for the branches one currently hasn't got checked out while  
> pulling,
> and the branch that *is* checked out gets merged (crazy, yes), so  
> those
> who prefer the rebase would get what they want by doing something  
> completely
> bonkers, such as:
>
> git checkout -b just-gonna-pull HEAD^
> git pull
> git checkout whatever-other-branch-they-were-on
>
> (yes, "aggresively ignorant", I think Ted said in an earlier mail)
>
> It'd probably be better to go with Dscho's suggestion, although I'm  
> not quite
> sure what that was any more. It involved automagical rebasing on  
> fetch or pull
> though.

git pull's automagic and the automatic behaviour of git checkout
proposed by Junio should always do the same. git pull should
be changed to act a if your three commands were fused into it
(but obviously implemented differently).

I think teaching "git checkout" a dwim mode is quite
interesting.  The required work to bring a local branch
up-to-date with a remote branch is deferred until really needed.
An then "git checkout" does the right thing. A lot of automagic
but definitely intriguing.

	Steffen