On 23/07/2021 08:30, Jeff King wrote: > On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 08:24:25PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> I'm not trashing the current behavior, I'm explaining what the consensus >> is. I spent several man-days re-reading old threads, and this is the >> consensus of what should happen: >> >> 1. git pull # merge HEAD into upstream >> 2. git pull origin topic # merge topic into HEAD >> >> Of the people that expressed an opinion, 100% of them stated that what >> `git pull` does in the first case today is not desirable. > I did not participate in the threads you linked earlier, so I am > probably not in that 100%. But you did use my name below: > >> Yes, you are correct that if *everyone* followed the topic branch >> workflow, everything would work correctly, but that's not what happens >> in reality, in reality people do all kinds of workflows, and wrong >> merges are pervasive. >> >> Everyone--including Linus, Jeff, and you--agree that there's two >> different ways of using `git pull`: integrator versus developer. >> >> When a user is doing `git pull` to synchronize changes to push to the >> same branch, that's a centralized two-way workflow, so he is acting both >> as an integrator and as a developer, and it's in that particular case >> that the order of the parents should be reversed. Everyone agrees on >> that. >> >> When the user the opposite explicitely: `git pull origin master` >> Linus calls it a "back-merge" [1], and in that case the order of the >> parents should not be reversed. > So I feel compelled to say now that I do not think that changing the > order of parents for "git pull" is the obviously correct thing to do. While I never `pull` because it's not right for me as a 'contributor', I do agree that the default 'maintainer' view of `pull` will need to be retained for long term backward compatibility. What I have rarely seen in the discussion is explanation that is based on workflow style, though the potential `update` command (1) may break some of the deadlock about the direction of 'pull requests', and possibly confusion regarding the location of the 'golden' publish repo. (1) there are a lot of 'update' commands floating about, esp on Git for Windows. If there is a suitably named `update` command to do the `pull --contributor` merge-ff swap then many of the issues could fade away. > And likewise, in the one thread I do remember participating in, I > expressed something similar: > > https://lore.kernel.org/git/20140502214817.GA10801@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > -Peff -- Philip
