Re: GIT 0.99.7d, and end of week status.

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Sep 26, 2005, 19:10 UTC
Message-ID: <20050926191037.GD26340@pasky.or.cz>
In-Reply-To: <7v7jd4n22i.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Dear diary, on Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 01:46:13AM CEST, I got a letter where Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> told me that...

Show 23 quoted lines

> Tom Prince <tom.prince@ualberta.net> writes:
> 
> >> When you already have a repository to track git.git, I would
> >> recommend to have something like this in .git/remote/origin:
> >>
> >>     URL: http://kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
> >>     Pull: master:origin maint:maint +pu:pu
> >>
> >
> > A warning when you do this. If you say 
> >
> >   git pull origin
> >
> > then your master will be updated with an octopus merge of the three heads.
> 
> Ahhhhhhhh.  That is true.  I always do "git fetch" and never do
> "git pull" against anything but a local repository, heads
> explicitly specified.  You are right.  The defaulting behaviour
> is incredibly broken.
> 
> Do people agree it is a good idea to change the "git pull
> origin" to mean "fetch all the default refs specified on Pull:
> lines, and merge only the first one into the current branch"?

I don't like that, the notion that you are fetching different stuff that you are merging then seems quite confusing to me. But fetching just the first revision will be confusing too. Either way, git-pull won't be equivalent to git-fetch && git-merge (or git-resolve or whatever is the core porcelain command) anymore. Well, the remotes stuff never got close to my heart.

One alternative I can think of is, in case there are multiple heads, require the user to explicitly specify the head he wants (origin#maint). This comes from the idea that multi-head remotes are there really primarily for fetching, not for pulling. There is also no potential for confusion. In addition, there might another line "Default" in the remote file, which could specify the default choice. It's just that choosing the first one implicitly makes me a bit nervous and has potential for bad mistakes. At least for Cogito, I would be reluctant to use it.

git-pull --merge-all or something to still do the octopus merge might be useful in some cases (or as well might not - perhaps the best strategy is to let whoever cares make a patch ;).

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
VI has two modes: the one in which it beeps and the one in which
it doesn't.