El 3/10/2007, a las 10:57, Miles Bader escribió:
To the extent that a command _is_ "dangerous", there's always a
tradeoff
between convenience and "danger". Some systems (e.g. those aimed at
newbies) might have as a goal to do the absolute minimum with every
command and always, always, err on the side of safety. I don't
think git
is that system.
While much of this debate can be shortcircuited simply by making the
behaviour configurable, I would like to take you up on the point that
you raise here.
If we're going to talk about what kind of system Git is then consider
this:
- it's inherently distributed and this design actively encourages
users to treat their local repositories as sandboxes where things are
tried out, perfected, and then pushed out into the public via one
means or another
- it's built from the ground up to be good at branching and merging;
this, combined with my previous point, means that users are likely to
have multiple heads and often some of them will be "works in
progress" that aren't yet ready for publication
So it's in that light I see accidentally pushing more than you
thought you would as "dangerous"; when you make this mistake you're
basically making stuff available that's not yet ready for
consumption, and by its nature this mistake is basically
irreversible: you can't really "unpush" what you pushed, you can only
push out additional amendments which correct it.
So, in this light, when you say:
What's "dangerous" for newbies, often ends up being what doesn't
correspond with their mental model.
I don't know how much it has to do with mental models. I think in
this case it's a bit simpler than that where you make the mistake
once or twice and very quickly learn that "git push" means "push
what's in my repo", not "push only what's on my current branch". It's
a *very* easy lesson to learn if you get burnt and hardly requires
any adjustments to ones "mental model".
I personally would be in favour of changing the default because I
tend to work on a particular branch at a time and then want to push
*that* out -- generally I'm thinking about one general area or one
task at a time, and that means one branch at a time; I almost never
think along the lines of getting all my branches into shape at once
and then pushing them out in a batch. I think this is more likely to
be a common pattern, although obviously that remains speculation at
this point.
Changing the default would be great for people like me; by not having
to pass additional parameters to git-push I save some keystrokes. If
I ever want to push everything an "--all" switch would do the job.
But if people prefer to keep the old default then there'll
be .gitconfig for people like me. In any case I think more people
need to speak up on the topic so that we can find out what most
people really think about changing the default.
Cheers,
Wincent
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