Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] push: advise about force-pushing as an alternative to reconciliation

[Alex Henrie <alexhenrie24@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 10:47 PM Alex Henrie <alexhenrie24@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 12:33 PM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 08/07/2023 19:56, Alex Henrie wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 2:49 AM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>> +        "before pushing again, or use 'git push --force' to delete the remote\n"
> > >>> +        "changes and replace them with your own.\n"
> > >>
> > >> I think it would be good to give a bit more context here as to when
> > >> force pushing is a good idea. For example something like
> > >>
> > >>       If you have rebased the branch since you last integrated remote
> > >>       changes then you can use
> > >>       'git push --force-with-lease=<branch-ref> --force-if-includes' to
> > >>       safely replace the remote branch.
> > >>
> > >>       If you have deleted and then recreated the branch since you last
> > >>       integrated remote changes then you can use 'git push +<branch>' to
> > >>       replace the remote. Note that if anyone else has pushed work to
> > >>       this branch it will be deleted.
> > >>
> > >> It makes the advice longer  but the user get a specific suggestion for
> > >> their current situation rather than a generic suggestion to delete the
> > >> remote changes without discussing the implications. In this case we know
> > >> that it was the current branch that was rejected and so should fill in
> > >> the branch name in the advice as well.
> > >
> > > Even if we could fill in <branch-ref> automatically, it's too much to
> > > ask the user to type out --force-with-lease=<branch-ref>
> > > --force-if-includes.
> >
> > Can't they just copy and paste the command from the advice message? Even
> > if the user does not copy and paste it is not that hard to type it out
> > with the benefit of the shell's tab completion. You're basically saying
> > this combination of options is unusable in practice because it is too
> > much effort to type them. We could look to see if we can make it less
> > unwieldy by changing push to allow --force-if-includes=ref imply
> > --force-with-lease for instance.
>
> Yes, `git push --force-with-lease=<branch-ref> --force-if-includes` is
> cryptic and unwieldy, and even asking users to copy and paste a
> command is a bit much. If that's what's presented as the alternative
> to integration via `git pull`, it could make users who want to
> overwrite the remote branch think that force-pushing isn't what they
> want because what they want is conceptually very simple, so they
> expect it to have a simple user interface.
>
> It's possible that improvements will be made to this user interface in
> the future, but that's definitely not something that I'm going to
> tackle. I just want Git to give decent advice about what is available
> right now. If we can't agree on what specific command to recommend,
> maybe we can at least agree to tone down these messages to not sound
> so prescriptive. Just changing "Use 'git pull' to integrate..." to
> "You can use 'git pull' to integrate...' would be a big improvement.

Whoops, I accidentally quoted my own proposed text as if it were the
current text. The current text is in fact "Integrate the remote
changes..." which is stronger still.

-Alex