Re: git and rebasing

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-04-09 at 00:55 +0100, Simos wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> In my latest push to gtk+, I noticed that I had a "Merge branch
> 'master' of ssh://simos git gnome org/git/gtk+" in the commit message.
> URL is
> http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gtk+/
> http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gtk+/commit/?id=fbbbf7a936f891dfc0d7f0e4b78aeefe972d6825
> 
> Obviously, this happened because I committed my change before pulling.
> I suspect that this will be quite common once the translation teams
> start using git.
> I'ld like to figure out the best way to address the issue.
> 
> Shall we instruct people to always
> $ git --rebase pull
> before they
> $ git push

To a good approximation 'git pull' is *never* right when pulling from
git.gnome.org. Everybody - developers, translators, etc, always should
'git pull --rebase'.

The default behavior of 'git pull' is really designed for the case where
multiple cooperating developers are merging changes from each other.

I'm wondering if I should put a pre-update hook into place that looks
for merge commits containing the text:...

 Merge branch 'master' of ssh://

Since that pretty much always means someone did a 'git pull' and got an
extraneous merge commit.

> Obviously these two commands are not a single atomic operation, so
> there are always chances to get a merge branch.

If someone else commits in between, a push won't be allowed (not a fast
forward.) Repeating 'git pull --rebase' will fix.

- Owen