Hi,
On Thu, 29 Jan 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> @@ -239,9 +239,12 @@ static const char *update(struct command *cmd)
> " that are now in HEAD.");
> break;
> case DENY_REFUSE:
> - if (!is_ref_checked_out(name))
> + if (is_bare_repository() || !is_ref_checked_out(name))
> break;
> - error("refusing to update checked out branch: %s", name);
> + error("refusing to update checked out branch: %s\n"
> + "if you know what you are doing, you can allow it by "
> + "setting\n\n"
> + "\tgit config receive.denyCurrentBranch true\n", name);
> return "branch is currently checked out";
> }
>
> As the message I am currently getting from such a push is:
>
> $ git push ../victim-010 next:master
> Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
> warning: updating the currently checked out branch; this may cause confusion,
> as the index and working tree do not reflect changes that are now in HEAD.
> To ../victim-010
> a34a9db..d79e69c next -> master
>
> which is much better than what you did. It at least tries to explain why
> it is warning, even though I think it has a huge room for improvement.
I do not really care about the output. You are probably right, it should
be different from what I proposed.
> You alluded that we wanted to make grace period much longer, but you
> want to cut it short. I think it is a huge mistake. The warning has
> only been there for the last two months, and only can be seen from
> v1.6.1-rc1 or newer software. These new people even haven't a chance to
> learn from the existing warning.
In reality, people will not learn from the warning. Those that are
old-timers (and who should be warned in the first place, instead of
refuses) will just happily ignore that there was a warning: the command
they used so often and the worked all the time just happened to work --
again -- no matter what the output is.
But we are really hurting new users, and let's face it, the balance of
time cost currently is in a huge favor of the old-timers there.
Not only are there many more newbies these days than old timers.
No, the _time_ spent by an old-timer to read an appropriate message and
fix the setup would be _substantially_ shorter than the _hours_ of
frustration a newbie spends on the issue.
And we claim to make decentralized repositories easy.
> I think what would work much better would be a patch that keeps the
> warn-but-allow as the default, but clarifies the warning message.
As I said, I am _convinced_ that a warning will do nothing at all. Just
like the warning about the dashed commands, nobody who should be concerned
will notice it.
> (1) what symptoms, that are easily observable by the most novice users,
> are caused by "index and work tree going out of sync" the warning
> talks about, and why that would not be what they want;
>
> (2) if the user did not mean to do it (and the user can tell by observing
> the symptom described in the previous point), describe what needs to
> be done to recover from the fallout this push has caused (we do not
> need a recipe; pointing at a URL or manpage is fine), and what switch
> to flip to prevent herself from doing it again in the future;
>
> (3) if the user did mean it, and finds the above two big warning
> annoying, what switch to flip to squelch the warning for future
> pushes.
>
> The goal of the warning should be to *force* people *choose*, either to
> silently-allow (aka DENY_IGNORE) or refuse (DENY_REFUSE), and give enough
> information for them to make an informed decision. We can afford to be
> annoyingly long, loud and verbose there.
>
> On the other hand, you cannot make the message for DENY_REFUSE annoyingly
> long, as people may have already chosen to say "please refuse my push into
> a live branch".
>
> If you are making "refuse" the default, an annoyingly long message is even
> worse. "Yeah, thanks for stopping me, but you do not have to remind me
> every time that I made a mistake in large red letters. I perfectly well
> know what I am doing, I perfectly well know that I did not want to push
> into that branch, I just made a mistake---you do not have to be so loud".
>
> I suspect that you cannot even be long enough to be informative, not to
> annoy people.
Let's reap all the opinions about this issue, and then I'll do the wrap-up
patch.
But this is a serious issue that seriously needs to be coped with. We are
getting another generation of "Git is difficult" users that way.
Ciao,
Dscho
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