Prevent arcanist from commiting to remote

Question

This may be just a confusion of mine.

When I submit an phabricator revision, I see that (in some cases) arcanist commits my revision message to the remote repo?

Why is this happening? Can i prevent this?

I don't want to merge and push unnecessary changes to the code base.

Answer 1

arc diff itself won't push any commit. All that happens is that it creates a diff (git diff) and send those changes to Differential. This is not like a branch, your git repository is untouched. From this diff a revision is created which will be used for this pre-push code review.

The message associated with this revision will be asked by default and will default to your commit message.

The remote repository is only changed if:

• You git push yourself
• If you use arc land

Arc land will do (by default) the following steps:

• Squash your changes (reduce to 1 commit)
• Checkout/update master
• Merge the branch into it
• Push to origin/master
• Delete the branch

Most of the arc land behavior can be tweaked, for example you can use arc land --merge to prevent squashing your commits and merge them as-is.