On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 8:50 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I still do not know offhand if the 'simple' thing makes > sense without thinking it through, At the risk of insisting too much, I'd like to break this down into 3 parts: 1) To what extent does a "there is one remote, and local and remote branches have the same name unless I explicitly choose to do something different" perspective make sense to a given population of users, and how large is that population of users? 2) For those users, can and should we have a better UX? 3) To what extent does it make sense to call this mode of working "simple", what are the best UX changes to make, what should any new options be called, and how should discoverability be implemented? 1. Audience: I understand that git was designed as a distributed VCS, and that's a completely fundamental aspect of its power and success... but the reality (or "my claim"?) is that the vast majority of users end up using git with a single remote per repo. I don't know how to categorically confirm this - I suspect the github/microsoft, google and other sponsor-type folks here will have more access to research on the topic. I don't want to imply that git should do less, but just that the idea of "multiple remotes" is alien to almost every git user I've ever interacted with. Obviously as I work in a corporate environment I have a particular perspective... but I find this to be true of github users also. Within the context of such "single remote per repo" users, I've spoken with a dozen users of varying git experience levels to try to understand whether *any* of them intentionally end up with an "upstream tracking branch different from the local branch name" scenario, and what they use it for. I found two users who had ever done this intentionally: One who had done it once, when faced with a project with crazy machine-generated branch names, and another who does it routinely to have nice short local branch names (very much an advanced user and enthusiast). To the majority it's only ever happened by accident, and they didn't even understand what was going on. It was just a weird message they got and eventually worked around. Amusingly, one was an old hand, and still avoided the default "git push" because he remembered a time when that pushed all branches, and did not realize the default behavior had changed to "current branch, as long as remote tracking name matches" (aka push.default=simple) 8 years ago. All these users are aware that there are options that change git's behavior, but the only one who ever took the time to understand and consider changing the defaults was the expert user enthusiast. I realize all this is anecdotal, I'm a hobbyist and a novice in this community, and the deployment I support only has a few hundred users at the moment - but surely there must be a way to confirm whether it's true that git's primary value to millions of users in the world is in a context where there is a single remote, and branches normally and intentionally have exactly the same name locally and on that single remote? 2. Current Experience Taking the user model/workflow above and its statistical significance as a given, what's the "problem"? A) a user can accidentally end up in an unexpected state, and not easily understand why or what's going on, if they do "git checkout -b mybranch origin/whatever" - that is, if they choose to branch from a known remote state, rather than creating a local branch for that remote branch first. In this unexpected state their "git pull" is not doing what they expect (it's bringing in changes from a *different* branch), and their "git push" is not working. Furthermore, the error message for "git push" is not actually giving them the right option to solve their problem - it suggests they push to the same-name remote branch, but does not propose the "-u" option, because git can't be sure the mismatching branch name isn't intentional and "-u" would be a kind of destructive change! So they will remain in this weird/unexpected state unless/until they figure out for themselves to specify -u or otherwise change the tracking upstream. I've seen people delete the local branch, and recreate it, just to sort out the remote tracking, because it's just not obvious to them what is going on! Other flows don't have this issue, eg if they first "git checkout master" (potentially creating a new master branch with tracking from remote) and then "git checkout -b mybranch". That inconsistency is part of the problem - it forces affected users to think about remote tracking branches in a way they shouldn't need to, in a way that is basically alien to their day-to-day experience and expectations of the relationship between local and remote. B) When a user creates a new branch and they want to push it, they get an error that spits out a magical incantation hint, they repeat the magical incantation, and then things are working as expected. This is a lot better than lacking the hint, of course, but is a completely unnecessary interruption in their workflow, *given the assumption that remote branches for these users always have the same name as local branches anyway*. The intention of a default "git push", in this (in my opinion vast-majority) situation, is simply to make this branch work with its remote equivalent. 3) Naming & changes to git behaviors One way to approach the desired flow above would be to do away with or ignore the concept of upstream tracking branches altogether, and have a git behavior mode in which "git pull", "git push", and "git status" all work automatically and consistently with the same-name remote branch. I think there are a few problems with that approach: - It would not be an on-ramp to slightly different behaviors / modes of functioning - We'd have to figure out what to do with any then-ignored upstream tracking entries for existing branches - It would involve a lot of code changes - It would be hard to explain in relation to all the rest of the doc/behaviors - A user interested in working with just a single locally-differently-named branch (eg because they're working on a server with remote branch names that they can't change and are inconveniently long, or have complex prexif/namespacing requirements) would not be able to make use of such a mode - they'd have to switch to the "full/normal" mode. Therefore, it makes more sense to figure out the smallest changes in behavior that lead to meeting the expectations/conveniences above, and don't prevent still keeping branches that have a different name to the remote, when that is very explicitly desired & specified. Hence the proposals in this patch series. I do truly believe that the two small changes (new "don't auto-track differently-named upstream branches" option, and new "automatically add remote tracking for same-name branch if missing" option) are the right thing. What I don't know, is whether they are *named* in the best possible way, and whether the text of the proposed "hints" is the best way to help the (in my opinion) majority of users who will probably benefit from setting things up this way. > but I think that the 'missing > origin is fine and we can use the unique remote if exists' is a > really good idea, Cool, that's an easy one, and a separate commit if you want to split it off. It's a prerequisite for the "push.autoSetupRemote" to work well (in repos that have a single remote not called "origin"), but it does not depend on the other proposed changes. > especially if some push strategies already do so > and some don't, which seems to be the case. Not exactly - there are other *commands* that do this kind of "the single remote" defaulting, but not other push strategies. The reason I called out only two default push strategies explicitly, is that they are the ones that can work without a remote tracking branch being configured at all (as long as there is a remote called origin); the other strategies depend on a remote being explicitly configured as push default, or as branch remote, or as branch push remote. > > Will queue. Great thx.
