| I'm not sure what Silence is about. My git-config-fu fails me. One Thing Well demonstrates how one command (git checkout), while it does do 'one thing well' (changing your working directory to match something in the index), can handle a wide variety of seemingly unrelated use cases. Only the Gods demonstrates how history can mean different things: commit parentage, which is usually immutable, and branch history, which is ephemeral. The Hobgoblin probably refers to the Emerson quote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The Long and the Short of It is about how git accepts `git --help command`, `git command --help`, and `git command -h` but `git -h command` returns an argument error. A theme here is that git does not try to anticipate your workflow. Its commands and options are named based on what they do, rather than how you should probably use them. This makes git a very powerful tool, but with an interface that is often counter-intuitive. |
Apparently, git does not allow you to alias default git commands (like "pull", "push", "commit", etc) to something else. In the given situation, a user is trying to alias the default "pull" command to "pull --ff-only" so that pull will not automatically merge changes and will only fast-forward.
However, since git does not allow you to alias default commands, when the Git Master runs "git pull" it ignores the alias entirely and does a normal pull, and in so doing merges changes. The student is confused, but eventually figures it out.