Re: Git rescue mission

From: Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com>
Date: Feb 8, 2007, 21:57 UTC
Message-ID: <17867.40122.51865.575762@lisa.zopyra.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702080858430.8424@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 09:27:50 (-0800) Linus Torvalds writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

>On Wed, 7 Feb 2007, Bill Lear wrote:
>> 
>> I have a public bare repo on my machine that I have cloned to make a
>> private repo.  I just want to sync my branches on my public and
>> private repos.  I do not want to merge across branches, I just want to
>> "sync".
>
>Ok, others already replied, but here's a few rules to ease your mind in 
>general:
>
> - First off: you can always _trivially_ get back to whatever state you 
>   had before, as long as you committed it, and didn't have any dirty 
>   state (uncommitted patches) in your working tree.
>...

Well, I have read all of the very welcome advice and am comfortable with all of it.

However, I still have a few open issues with the other branch of this discussion, i.e., why can we not have an update operation that respects branches in the first place, as 'git pull' seems to do, when run from the master branch? I do realize that the branch 'foo' in my repo is different from the branch 'foo' in your repo. However, I want to track things, and "track" here is a very appropriate word. Tracks don't cross, and I don't want to cross my "logically equivalent" branches (at least yet), even though, as Linus pointed out in great detail, this is easy to undo (though, do see below for a qualification of "easy").

So, why should I care?

Because, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So, if a pound of undo is so very easy, then, in my mind, an ounce of preventing the problem in the first place is at least 1/16th that.

When working in a peer-to-peer relationship, I often push and pull with my peers, perhaps on a daily basis, perhaps weekly. Just the other day, my peer was the one who goofed up his branches and I pulled them into my public repo, all tangled up, and did not realize it. Thence pulled into my private repo, did lots of work, pushed back to my public repo, and after more time intervened, realized something was wrong. It took a LOT of work (for me, I'm sure for others here it would have been much, much less) for me to 1) figure out the genesis of the problem, and 2) figure out how to undo it all without destroying my subsequent work. When we both do this, and merge unexpectedly, at different points on one branch from a different point on another, and then pollute each others' repos, it does become rather ... well, annoying is the best way to put it.

In CVS, if I am on branch topic and say 'cvs update', it updates my branch topic. If I am on branch master and say 'cvs update', it updates my branch master. Etc., etc. It doesn't matter that you move from one branch to the other, the update behavior is the same. In git, if I am on master, things seem to work wonderfully --- one 'git pull' and my entire repo is synced (that is, merged) as I expect with the other repo.

I really don't want to do 'git fetch'. I really want 'git pull'. I really want the changes put into my repo, from that repo's branch X onto my branch X, and that repo's branch Y onto my branch Y. I really don't want to have to remember to switch to my master branch before I do git pull (this, however, as it stands, does seem to me to be the best option). Perhaps I'll just write a script 'git-sync' that does 'git checkout master; git pull'...

Jakub is of course literally correct when he says "'Crossing of the streams' is _required_ ... If you do parallel work ... you have to do merges". Again, I recognize that my "foo" branch is different from your "foo" branch, and that when they come together they are in fact merged, but logically they are one thing --- one stream of shared work that we don't want to slip over into another one, at least not until we are ready.

Again, thanks to everyone for their patience. We really do enjoy using git --- very cool, fast, and flexible.

Bill