Re: Restraining git pull/fetch to the current branch

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jan 12, 2007, 00:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20070112005921.GE23864@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701112127000.12870@beast.quantumfyre.co.uk>

Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> While trying out git on a large repository (10000s of commits, 1000s of 
> branches, ~2.5Gb when packed) at work I noticed that doing a pull was 
> taking a long time (longer than I was prepared to wait anyway).
> 
> A quick test showed that a small repository (1 commit, 24k .git/objects) 
> with 1000 branches took 1m30 to do "git pull" (local xfs partition).  I 
> don't know if this is reasonable or not, but all I actually cared 
> about was updating the current branch, which "git pull origin 
> <branch_name>" did in 0.3s.
> 
> So what I would like to know is: is there any way to make a pull/fetch 
> with no options default to only fetching the current branch? (other than 
> scripting "git pull/fetch origin $(git symbolic-ref HEAD)" that is)

No, but fortunately bash has a fancy alias tool:

	alias gp='git pull origin $(git symbolic-ref HEAD)'

perhaps your shell can help.  :-)

Life is going to be painful with that repository with current Git (1.5.0 and later) as the new default configuration for a clone is to copy every branch into refs/remotes/origin/*, where * is wildcarded against the current set of branches on the remote repository. If that takes "a long time" you will be processing a lot of refs you don't care about (or need to care about).

-- 
Shawn.