Re: [infinispan-dev] Still confused with the merge messages in Infinispan Git repo

I think Bob McWhirter had it right when he said "Don't use pull". There are two basic relevant operations here: merge and rebase. "Merge" means "append these commits after mine". "Rebase" means "Prepend these commits before mine". Using "merge" and "rebase" and avoiding "pull" is nice because "merge" and "rebase" use similar command-line arguments (and both require a "fetch" to make sure you're up to date) so there's a logical symmetry which is easy to remember. In addition you can make *sure* that an extra merge commit never happens with merge by doing "git merge whatever --ff-only", which will give an error if "whatever" needs to be rebased. As for the integrator doing rebasing - you can really do it either way. In AS7 we've most often been asking the submitter to rebase (via IRC) at the time the merge is done. This may seem impractical but it has happened in the past that the merge ultimately fails because of a test problem, review issue, etc. If the submitter has done the rebase, it's easier for them to fix any problems, rebase again (if needed), and resubmit the request. Again the mantra: rebase on upstream, merge (--ff-only) downstream. Never use "pull" or "merge" without "--ff-only" (in fact, I recommend not using "pull" at all, but that's up to you). Stick to these points and merge commits are a thing of the past. Another note. If you don't have any local changes, and you just want to sync up with upstream, rebase and merge will both do the same thing. If you do have local changes but you don't care about them and you want to throw them away, use "git reset --hard upstream/master" followed by "git clean -f -d" and you'll be synced up without any issues (make sure you're in your project root directory though). You may do a reset even if you don't have changes, it's just extra commands. Git is the kind of program that you can't learn by just memorizing commands - you have to understand what's going on inside (and it's not as complex as you might think). Once you get that, the commands are pretty natural, and even obvious in most cases. If you haven't yet done so, read "http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/". On 11/18/2010 10:04 AM, Emmanuel Bernard wrote: -- - DML