I am using git to track content which is changed by some people and shared "read-only" with others. The "readers" may from time to time need to make a change, but mostly they will not.

I want to allow for the git "writers" to rebase pushed branches** if need be, and ensure that the "readers" never accidentally get a merge. That's normally easy enough.

git pull origin +master

There's one case that seems to cause problems. If a reader makes a local change, the command above will merge. I want pull to be fully automatic if the reader has not made local changes, while if they have made local changes, it should stop and ask for input. I want to track any upstream changes while being careful about merging downstream changes.

In a way, I don't really want to pull. I want to track the master branch exactly.

** (I know this is not a best practice, but it seems necessary in our case: we have one main branch that contains most of the work and some topic branches for specific customers with minor changes that need to be isolated. It seems easiest to frequently rebase to keep the topics up to date.)