@@ -217,6 +217,47 @@ with this feature.
217217+
218218"--no-force-with-lease" will cancel all the previous --force-with-lease on the
219219command line.
220+ +
221+ A general note on safety: supplying this option without an expected
222+ value, i.e. as `--force-with-lease` or `--force-with-lease=<refname>`
223+ interacts very badly with anything that implicitly runs `git fetch` on
224+ the remote to be pushed to in the background, e.g. `git fetch origin`
225+ on your repository in a cronjob.
226+ +
227+ The protection it offers over `--force` is ensuring that subsequent
228+ changes your work wasn't based on aren't clobbered, but this is
229+ trivially defeated if some background process is updating refs in the
230+ background. We don't have anything except the remote tracking info to
231+ go by as a heuristic for refs you're expected to have seen & are
232+ willing to clobber.
233+ +
234+ If your editor or some other system is running `git fetch` in the
235+ background for you a way to mitigate this is to simply set up another
236+ remote:
237+ +
238+ git remote add origin-push $(git config remote.origin.url)
239+ git fetch origin-push
240+ +
241+ Now when the background process runs `git fetch origin` the references
242+ on `origin-push` won't be updated, and thus commands like:
243+ +
244+ git push --force-with-lease origin-push
245+ +
246+ Will fail unless you manually run `git fetch origin-push`. This method
247+ is of course entirely defeated by something that runs `git fetch
248+ --all`, in that case you'd need to either disable it or do something
249+ more tedious like:
250+ +
251+ git fetch # update 'master' from remote
252+ git tag base master # mark our base point
253+ git rebase -i master # rewrite some commits
254+ git push --force-with-lease=master:base master:master
255+ +
256+ I.e. create a `base` tag for versions of the upstream code that you've
257+ seen and are willing to overwrite, then rewrite history, and finally
258+ force push changes to `master` if the remote version is still at
259+ `base`, regardless of what your local `remotes/origin/master` has been
260+ updated to in the background.
220261
221262-f::
222263--force::
0 commit comments