Re: Proposalö git push -F

[Xavier Morel <xmo@odoo.com>]

 > Because the form "--force-with-lease=<this-exact-commit>" is a
 > strict improvement over "--force", but the lazy "guess where the
 > other end should be" form, i.e. "--force-with-lease" alone, is worse
 > than "--force" in that it gives users false sense of security
 > without offering the safety the "lease" mechanism gives.

That seems like a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Generaly, "force with lease" is a better behaviour than "force". It will 
not catch all usage errors, but it will catch lots: again last week 
colleagues had issues which would had been caught by caught by using 
"--force-with-lease" instead" of "-f", but of course "-f" is "the 
default" in rebase-based workflows, what with being so short and sweet.

I found XonqNopp's proposal as I was planning to post a similar message, 
though stricter: I don't think `--force` deserves a short form at all, I 
  believe `-f` should be progressively migrated over to alias to 
`force-with-lease` as it's a significantly better default behaviour, and 
the odd *need* for `--force` (of which I can't personnally remember one) 
can be typed out in its entirety.

For the vast majority of users, all it will do is catch genuine errors. 
For a small minority it will have no effect[0]. And for an infinitesimal 
number it will be unhelpful as `--force` without lease or inclusion is 
genuinely what they were looking for.

I genuinely do not understand what `force-if-includes` does from reading 
the manpage and just learned that it exists from Johannes Schindelin's 
message, it might be an even better default behaviour for `-f`.

Either way I think `-f` should not, ultimately, alias to `--force`.

My idea there was to introduce a setting initially defaulting to `false` 
and a warning about the migration (triggered on `-f` when that setting 
is unset), then a few versions later flip the default to `true`.

[0] and I would expect users of tools which helpfully fetch in the 
background to not be using the CLI, and thus not be impacted by this change.