Re: Understanding a recent commit in emacs-25 branch [ed19f2]

[Ingo Lohmar <i.lohmar@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 03 2016 18:40 (+0300), Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I think your documentation might be outdated.  Here's what the "git
> pull" man page I have says:
>
>   In Git 1.7.0 or later, to cancel a conflicting merge, use git reset
>   --merge. Warning: In older versions of Git, running git pull with
>   uncommitted changes is discouraged: while possible, it leaves you in a
>   state that may be hard to back out of in the case of a conflict.
>
>   If any of the remote changes overlap with local uncommitted changes,
>   the merge will be automatically cancelled and the work tree
>   untouched. It is generally best to get any local changes in working
>   order before pulling or stash them away with git-stash(1).
>
> This is with Git 2.8.0.
>
> IOW, for a recent enough Git, they _recommend_ stashing, but no longer
> _warn_ about merging in this situation.  Which is exactly my
> experience.

For the sake of completeness, my 'git merge' man page for 2.8.0.rc3 says
(in the DESCRIPTION section):

       Warning: Running git merge with non-trivial uncommitted changes
       is discouraged: while possible, it may leave you in a state that
       is hard to back out of in the case of a conflict.

> I agree that it's preferable to have a clean repo, but in practice it
> doesn't always work to have it.  Being able to pull when you have
> uncommitted changes is an important feature; a VCS that doesn't
> support it is IMO severely broken, because it will get in the way.

We'll just have to disagree about the "severely broken" part.

>> It is my understanding (and I made it clear that it was partly
>> guesswork) that Alan asked precisely for that functionality.  I am not
>> sufficiently patronizing to tell intelligent people they are not ready
>> for something when they explicitly ask for it. :)
>
> You may wish re-reading some of Alan's past messages about his
> adventures with Git, to get a better idea about that.

I assume you mean a better idea about Alan's wishes..  Well, I actually
followed those threads, but what was asked for here does not remind me
of them.  Sorry if I was missing the point.