Re: git pull for update of netdev fails.

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:
>
>   I argue that this safety valve is useless for most people (and
> actually I have hard time imagining a plausible scenario in which it
> actually _is_ useful).

It is only useless for people who use git ass a read-only "anonymous CVS" 
kind of thing.

And yes, that may be "most people", but dammit, it's not the group git has 
been designed for. 

I would be ok with a "anonymous read-only" approach IF GIT ACTUALLY 
ENFORCED IT. In other words, we could easily have a read-only clone that 
added the "+" to all branches, but then we should also make sure that 
nobody ever commits _anything_ in such a repo.

No merges (because you can not rely on the merge result being meaningful: 
the sources of the merge may be "ephemeral"), no local commits (because 
you can never "pull" any more after that, since that now becomes a merge 
with something you can't trust any more).

In other words, if you default to the "+" behaviour, you basically can do 
_nothing_ in that repository except just track the other end.

Is that useful? Potentially. But it's so clearly inferior to what we have 
now that you should definitely realize that we're not talking about a full 
git repository any more, we're really talking about just a "git tracker".

		Linus