Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

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This is probably where I foul up.

My last few workplaces were either not git, or relied on git pull w/o rebase. My current workplace has rebase as part of their flow, and I find that, like, 60% of my PRs require force push, which bothers me greatly. Everyone else just shrugs and considers it part of business, but I know what I WANT to do should be nicely aligned and not encounter that problem.

Unfortunately, every explanation I'm like "yes, yes, branching trees, I get it..." and then I'm suddenly in the "...and it says things are different and I don't know why". And because this always happens when I'm trying to get some fix in, I never have the time to study it to figure out what is really happening. It's just "--force and promise myself the next time will be different".

> My current workplace has rebase as part of their flow

Not really sure what that means as rebase can be used in multiple ways, but you might want to try using:

`--force-with-lease` instead of `--force`

> This option allows one to force push without the risk of unintentionally overwriting someone else’s work

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/git-push-force-with-lease

That does sound like they're doing it wrong. Could you give an example?

> Could you give an example?

To the degree I understand it, sure:

We have master branch A

I create a feature branch B

Both get updates. Someone will do a rebase of B to the most-recent A and push that. (In my previous workplaces they would have just pulled the most recent A)

Here's where the confusion comes in: If I get the updated B but A has updated again, I cannot pull A nor rebase to A and successfully push the result without forcing. IIRC, on push it complains that my local branch is not up to date, but if I pull it will tell me I am up to date.

At least, that's what I think is the timing - since this involves multiple people I'm uncertain of what exactly occurs and the order, nor why problems are inconsistent. We don't have that many feature branches that have multiple people contributing AND requiring updates from the master branch, but it happens often enough.

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