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

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

On Sun, Apr 03 2016 18:01 (+0300), Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Ingo Lohmar <i.lohmar@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2016 14:30:27 +0200
>> Cc: Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>,
>> 	Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com>
>> 
>> Single caveat: Do NOT start a merge when you have uncommited changes.
>> If you want, do 'git stash' first to recover them later.
>
> I disagree with this caveat.  There's no reason to frighten people
> like that, as doing such merges will work most of the time.
>

This is not about frightening people; to reiterate, this is a prominent
warning on the git merge man page --- I will not tell people it's ok
when the official documentation discourages it.  Also, in my opinion it
is conceptually a bad practice to start git operations that affect the
commit graph (such as merge) from an unclean state.

>> In this case, you have to learn about rebase, as in 'git rebase
>> origin/master'.
>
> "git rebase" is a bad idea when merging a long-lived feature branch,
> so please don't advise this to users who are evidently not Git
> experts.

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. :)