git-fc

git-fc is a friendly fork of git, which means it’s a fork that won’t deviate from the mainline; it is more like a branch in git terms. This branch will move forward close to git’s mainline, and it could be merged at any point in time, if the maintainer wished to do so.

git-fc doesn’t include experimental code, or half-assed features, so you can expect the same level of stability as git’s mainline. Also, it doesn’t remove any feature, or do any backwards incompatible changes, so you can replace git with git-fc and you wouldn’t notice any missing feature, only extra features.

Maintenance

Each release of git is merged directly into git-fc, so if there’s a new feature in git, git-fc will get it as well.

Every extra feature is maintained individually in a separate branch, so if you are interested in a specific feature and don’t trust the rest of git-fc, you can use that branch instead. For example the publish branch feature is maintained in the ‘fc/publish’ branch which sits on top of git.git’s v2.32. You can grab the specific branch and do whatever you want with it.

Extra features

New ‘git update’ command

Everybody has agreed the git pull command is broken for most use-cases, which is why most seasoned git users avoid it, and it is recommended that new users to avoid it as well.

A new command is necessary for the most common use case, which is fetch all the updates and advance the current branch if possible.

The new git update will fast-forward to the latest commit in the remote branch if there’s no divergence (you haven’t made extra commits). But if you have made extra commits you will be told to do either merge or rebase. This is the behavior everyone has agreed is the best.

This ensures that new users won’t be making merges by mistake.

Additionally, when doing a merge the order of the parents is be reversed, so it would appear as if you are merging your local branch to the remote one, and not the other way around like git pull does. Again, everyone has agreed this is serious a problem with git pull.

Blog post: git update: the odyssey for a sensible git pull.

Pending

A previous instance of git-fc had more features but I’ve decided to re-start from scracth, therefore not all the features are available right now. Some of these are almost ready, others still need a lot more work:

• Publish branch
• Default aliases
• Official staging area
• Better branch –list
• New fetch.default configuration

Contributions

Contributions are welcome on the mailing list git-fc@googlegroups.com.