> And if I push without first pulling
I think I know git well, but you got me confused. I've never heard of pushes causing merges. Surely you are talking about pulls, right?
I think I know git well, but you got me confused. I've never heard of pushes causing merges. Surely you are talking about pulls, right?
The only theory that makes sense is that this person doesn't know how to `pull --rebase`, but the order of `push` vs `pull` wouldn't change the presence of merge commits, so I'm still confused.
If I pull from origin before making my changes, I don’t have to merge, obviously.
But correct me if I’m wrong: I think that if I don’t pull first, but my changes don’t conflict with any part of what was done by the previous commit(s) I missed, I’ll still have to merge if I touched a file they touched.
This is a common scenario for me. Correct some typos in comments for example, and I get forced to figure out how to merge using vim, which I don’t know how to use at all (being a nano user). I’m sure I could and should switch to at least using nano by default, but I don’t know how merging really works, either.
What I really want to do is undo my commit, pull, and redo my commit. Then I don’t have to figure out git merge.
I do understand the problem being discussed; what I don't understand is what it has to do with pushing first. You have the same problem no matter which order you use `git push` vs `git pull`.
> I think that if I don’t pull first, but my changes don’t conflict with any part of what was done by the previous commit(s) I missed, I’ll still have to merge if I touched a file they touched.
Yes, that's true.
> What I really want to do is undo my commit, pull, and redo my commit. Then I don’t have to figure out git merge.
You can do that with `git pull --rebase`, which, as others have mentioned, you can set as the default behavior of `git pull` like this:
1. After making a PR, there are conflicts when merging into main. In a merge-based workflow, I would merge main into the feature branch, resolve any conflicts, then push. In a rebase-based workflow, I rebase the branch onto main, resolve any conflicts, but now I need to push --force. As some of the other comments have mentioned, this can be improved with --force-with-lease, but still isn't the greatest.
2. After making a PR, there are some typos that need to be fixed. Fix these in an interactive rebase, to edit the same commit that introduced the typos. Also requires either --force or --force-with-lease.
3. When the PR is accepted, the result is rebased on top of main. My local branch still exists, and must be deleted. I would prefer to use `git branch -d` to delete the feature branch, but this rightfully says that the feature branch hasn't been merged in. I instead need to use `git branch -D` to forcefully delete it, introducing a point of human error. (There are some cases where git can delete the branch safely, which I think occurs either when the feature branch has only a single commit, or when the feature branch can be applied on top of main without a rebase, but I haven't exactly determined it.)
#1 and #3 are cases where a safer option cannot be used due to a rebase-workflow. #2 would exist in either case, since even in a merge workflow, rebasing of branches before they are pulled makes sense to do.
FWIW: it occurs when the feature branch was based on the tip of master (because no-one else has committed to master since you branched/since you rebased onto master) - in this case rebasing your feature branch onto master is a no-op and the commits that go into master have the same hashes as they had on your feature branch.