Summary of discussion on "git push" default change

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

By now it should be obvious that most people would prefer to see the
default behaviour for 'git push' to be something other than matching, even
if you did not read each and every "me too" message.

Actually, we've known it from the beginning. Otherwise, we wouldn't have
made noises about it in the first place ;-).  It was not the primary
objective of the discussion thread to decide if we are going to switch
away from 'matching' by voting (waking up those who are sleeping, so that
they do not have to be surprised with "I didn't know that was happening!"
was).

The new default we are switching to is not about how many people prefer it
for their own use. It is about what default is the least confusing to the
new users.  A default whose behaviour is easy to explain, easy to follow
and easy to understand is the goal. Once people understand what they want
and realize they fall into a minority, it is easy for them to configure
their push.default to something else, like 'matching'. And 'matching' was
a bad default for that purpose; it was the hardest to explain and
understand in the context of the workflows of many new people.

Many people said that they like 'upstream' solely based on their personal
preference, but a few people did justify their preference of 'upstream'
over 'current' based on their experience in teaching new people and
observing the sharp edges that hurt them. And they all sounded reasonable.

In order to show how the world after phase #2 of the transition [*1*]
would look like to developers, testers and early adopters, I am planning
merge Matthieu's patch mm/push-default-switch-warning topic [*2*] to
'next', together with Christopher's ct/advise-push-default topic [*3*];
hopefully these topics can be merged to 'master' soon after 1.7.10 final.

Thanks.

To people who helped spreading the initial RFD message: please do feel
free to distribute this message to the same channels, too.


[References]

*1* http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/193308

*2* https://github.com/gitster/git/commit/5293b54

*3* https://github.com/gitster/git/commit/f25950f