Elijah Newren <newren@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Let me ask two questions: > > 1. When is it beneficial for users to set both pull.ff and pull.rebase? > 2. Is it harmful to users for us to allow both to be set when we will > just ignore one? > > I believe the answer to (1) is "never", and the answer to (2) is "yes". I agree (1) never gives you anything, even though it does not hurt, and (2) is "meh". > For the second question in particular, I can think of two example cases: > > 2a) Users start with pull.ff=only, perhaps suggested by someone else > and left in their config for a long time. When users hit a case that > can't fast-forward and they either ask for help or find a post on > stack overflow that suggests setting pull.rebase=true, they do so and > then get no warning that the setting they just added is being ignored. Well, overriding "only fast-forward is allowed" with "instead of merge, you can rebase" is a nonsense suggestion in the first place, no? Why does Git suddenly become responsible for such a misguided suggestion? > 2b) Perhaps users start with pull.rebase=true (suggested by a > colleague and forgot about it as they are more of a tester than a > developer and thus usually only see fast-forwards). Then at some > point they need to function as an integrator, and they read the docs > and determine that pull.ff=false should do what they want to create > merge commits. Again, "I want to pee in the snow" is not what you need to act as an integrator. I do not see how relevant this example is, either. You are just reacting to a wrong suggestion. > But then they get shocked that they've rebased public > commits (and perhaps also pushed them out) when they wanted merges. > Our docs have pretty clearly stated that pull.ff=false and --no-ff > create merges. That is something we need to and can fix. The "pee in the snow commit can be created by passing --no-ff" was written back when the designed audiences of "pull" were primarily those who merge (think of "pull --rebase" as afterthought). IOW, to the minds of those who originally wrote --no-ff feature (and its doc), "pull --rebase" was not in the picture.
