Re: Dangers of working on a tracking branch

From: Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com>
Date: Feb 15, 2007, 21:33 UTC
Message-ID: <17876.53654.426022.454712@lisa.zopyra.com>
In-Reply-To: <17876.52962.662946.582507@lisa.zopyra.com>

On Thursday, February 15, 2007 at 15:21:38 (-0600) Bill Lear writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

>On Thursday, February 15, 2007 at 16:00:23 (-0500) Nicolas Pitre writes:
>>On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Bill Lear wrote:
>>
>>> We are about to switch to git 1.5 from git 1.4.4.1.  I cannot remember
>>> if someone posted about this, but what is the danger of working on a
>>> tracking branch --- there are abundant cautions about doing this, but
>>> I can't recall and can't find the reason this is bad.
>>
>>A tracking branch is supposed to be a local mirror of what is available 
>>remotely.  If you commit local changes to it then you break that model.
>
>Ok, so I break the model, what is the harm in that?  Can I no longer
>pull from or push to the remote branch?  Do I corrupt something
>locally?  Does something else break?  I'm trying to formulate an
>explanation to our users why the 1.5 way is superior and I can't just
>say "if you do that you break the model".

BTW, my ignorant assumption is that for merging to take place, git requires two branches, so 'git pull' will fetch into the tracking branch and then merge onto your ... uh ... whatever the name of the working version of your tracking branch is.

BTW, again, why does git clone not have an option to just create all of the "working versions" (better name needed) of tracking branches?

Bill