Unnamed branches

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Jul 28, 2005, 19:19 UTC
Message-ID: <20050728191959.GB24948@pasky.ji.cz>
In-Reply-To: <200507282053.56786.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>

Dear diary, on Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 08:53:56PM CEST, I got a letter where Josef Weidendorfer <Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de> told me that...

Show 11 quoted lines

> So why not put the name of the remote repository into the local branch name?
> A remote branch "host1:path#branch1" could be named "host1:path#branch1".
> The shorthand specified with "cg-add-branch" would be a local alias, i.e.
> 	(cd .git/refs/heads; ln -s host1:path#branch1 mylocalalias)
> 
> I even would find it handy to be able to say
> 	cg-pull host1:path#branch1
> , and
> 	cg-push mylocalbranch host2:path#branch2
> should create the alias "mylocalbranch"="host2:path#branch2"
> and create a entry in .git/branches.

  This is a sensible argument, and I initially disallowed this mainly to
save some work. ;-) But I agree that something like this would be nice.
The issues:

  * How to name the unnamed branches? You need some way to normalize
URLs like http://www.kernel.org/pub/s%63m//cogito/ to something which is
unique for a given location (http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/cogito) and
usable as filename - at least substituting the slashes for something,
like underscores, and encoding underscored by % sequences.

  * Have all named remote branches as symlinks to their URLs (thus
effectively also eliminating the need for .git/branches/), or keep them
as they are? One disadvantage of the symlinks is that the refs/
directory would become quite messy.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
If you want the holes in your knowledge showing up try teaching
someone.  -- Alan Cox