Re: Change "pull" to _only_ download, and "git update"=pull+merge?

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@ucw.cz>
Date: Apr 19, 2005, 10:50 UTC
Message-ID: <20050419105008.GB12757@pasky.ji.cz>
In-Reply-To: <1113905110.1262.1.camel@nosferatu.lan>

Dear diary, on Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 12:05:10PM CEST, I got a letter where Martin Schlemmer <azarah@nosferatu.za.org> told me that...

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> On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 11:28 +0200, Petr Baudis wrote:
> > Dear diary, on Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 11:18:55AM CEST, I got a letter
> > where David Greaves <david@dgreaves.com> told me that...
> >
> > Dunno. I do it personally all the time, with git at least.
> > 
> > What do others think? :-)
> > 
> 
> I think pull is pull.  If you are doing lots of local stuff and do not
> want it overwritten, it should have been in a forked branch.

I disagree. This already forces you to have two branches (one to pull from to get the data, mirroring the remote branch, one for your real work) uselessly and needlessly.

I think there is just no good name for what pull is doing now, and update seems like a great name for what pull-and-merge really is. Pull really is pull - it _pulls_ the data, while update also updates the given tree. No surprises.

(We should obviously have also update-without-pull but that is probably not going to be so common so a parameter for update (like -n) should be fine for that.)

These naming issues may appear silly but I think they matter big time for usability, intuitiveness, and learning curve (I don't want git-pasky become another GNU arch).

Kind regards,

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. -- Steve Taylor