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I don't even like the habit of using "git pull". When training folks I start by introducing them to "git fetch" and manually merging or rebasing on the remote tracking branch so they're fully in control of the process while understanding what's going on.

Only after people grok that do I mention "git pull", and only in passing while discouraging its use.

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I agree with that. I have an alias for "git pull --ff-only", which I use often though.

It's faster than manually doing the fetch and then merge/rebase. If it succeeds you're at the newest version, if not you can still decide whether to merge or rebase. This should be the default behavior for git pull in my opinion.

So basically you want them each time to do the job that git pull does right 99.999% of the time?

I don't know about him, but yes it's what I do too and I recommend it.

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