Re: git pull and merging.

From: Josef Weidendorfer <josef.weidendorfer@gmx.de>
Date: Dec 6, 2006, 16:44 UTC
Message-ID: <200612061744.31213.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <cc723f590612060205p1fd26cd7u3c7efc723b0177de@mail.gmail.com>

On Wednesday 06 December 2006 11:05, Aneesh Kumar wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> [branch "devel"]
>         remote = origin
>         merge = devel
> 
> [....]
> Now i thought merge should be local reference. So i changed it to
> merge = remotes/origin/devel.
> 
> That also didn't work.
> 
> Then i tried the name of the branch should be indicated as
> "refs/heads/devel" . That also didn't work.
> 
> So i guess i am missing something.

See man page of git-repo-config:

 branch.<name>.merge
  When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default
  remote branch to be merged.

I assume that the "devel" branch on the remote repo you cloned from is also "devel", more exactly "refs/heads/devel".

Now, instead of "git pull", git should default to

	git pull origin refs/heads/devel:refs/remotes/origin/devel

ie. it should update the local tracking branch "refs/remotes/origin/devel" with the remote branch "refs/heads/devel". The tracking branch "refs/remotes/origin/devel" will be merged with current branch afterwards.

Now looking at the documentation for branch.<name>.merge, it talks about the remote branch, which is "refs/heads/devel" in your case, ie. the first part of the refspec of the full "git pull" command above.

So, as you already posted (without explanation, therefore this mail), the config should be

 [branch "devel"]
         remote = origin
         merge = refs/heads/devel

However, "devel" alone should work here, as it can be matched with remote "refs/heads/devel". Seems to be a bug, as branch.<name>.merge seems to only being compared with the full canonical name in the implementation.

Josef