Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

From: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2006, 19:14 UTC
Message-ID: <200611151914.50530.andyparkins@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vk61woar5.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Wednesday 2006, November 15 17:55, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I think the latter is what clone has done always; take remote's
> HEAD and use that to initialize local master (there is no

It's this sort of thing that is confusing though - the remote HEAD branch could be anything, and yet that is made to be origin locally as a tracking branch and then master as the writable branch. What if upstream /has/ a master but "next" is its HEAD? You'd then get

 next:remotes/origin
 master:remotes/master

Then a local master which is actually upstream next!  Oh dear.

I may well have misunderstood what you've said above above clone always initialising master from remote's HEAD; if so please disregard what I'm saying.

Show 7 quoted lines

> > that as soon as git-clone has special capabilities (like --shared,
> > --local and --reference) then you are prevented from doing magic with
> > existing repositories.
>
> That is not entirely true.  clone has convenience because people
> asked.  It does not have to mean you are not allowed to give
> similar convenience to other commands.  Patches?

Absolutely, that was why I said clone shouldn't have special abilities. In fact, if you're willing you don't need clone at all; you just need git-init-db and to write the correct remotes file.

> > branches from two other local repositories that have the objects hard
> > linked?
>
> fetch by second local repository with git-local-fetch perhaps.

Is that not plumbing?  I thought this was about porcelain.

> A consensus would not write code and it generally does not take
> technology into account to tell what is realistic and what is
> not, so the result needs to be take with a grain of salt,
> though.

Of course, I only suggested it because the same suggestions were popping up multiple times. Anyway; I put it in the GitWiki at http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/Wishlist

Andy

-- 
Dr Andrew Parkins, M Eng (Hons), AMIEE