Re: git pull with "no common commits" : danger?

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Aghiles wrote:

> I mistakenly pulled a project into another project. I had the
> "warning: no common commits" but the pull did proceed.

First: you are aware that interrupting the pull will have no bad
side-effects, right?  So if the worry is lost time, then git is not
advertising its features well enough.

Because of this, if ‘git fetch’ starts refusing to fetch when there
are no common commits, I will be unhappy, because it imposes hassle on
the user for basically no benefit.

On the other hand, ‘git pull’ is a little different.  The fetch has
very little cost because it’s interruptible, but the merge could
result in two unrelated pieces of history being merged, requiring
the user to use ‘git reset --keep HEAD^’ to get back to the
previous state.  A more likely outcome is a merge conflict, requiring
‘git reset --merge’ to recover.

Can we make this less painful?  Is it worth adding yet another option
to ‘git pull’ to avoid this pain?  I don’t know.

Regards,
Jonathan