Re: Dangers of working on a tracking branch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 15, 2007, 21:58 UTC
Message-ID: <20070215215816.GA3757@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <17876.54845.708466.669437@lisa.zopyra.com>

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 03:53:01PM -0600, Bill Lear wrote:

> Is this really the way 1.4.4.1 works?  I have (mistakenly) been
> working on my tracking branch, committing to it, pushing it, pulling
> in from elsewhere, shifting to new branches, etc., and I haven't lost
> anything, and can't see what harm I've done...

Sorry, I thought you were talking about v1.5. v1.4.* does not have the detached HEAD feature, and the default layout is to keep tracking and local branches in the same namespace. This means that you can checkout and commit to a tracking branch just as a local branch, and all changes will be saved. It will only bite you later, when you try to fetch into that tracking branch and realize that the fetch is not a fast-forward (remember the troubles you were having with fetches and pushes last week? Those were caused by working on the tracking branches).

Those branches were moved to a separate namespace in v1.5 so that it's harder to accidentally commit to them.

Show 5 quoted lines

> >  git checkout -b topic origin/topic
> 
> Sure, it is easy, but it's surprising to (our) users when they
> do a clone and can't "jump right in", and have to spend 3 seconds
> doing the above...

Fair enough. It should be pretty simple to implement; why don't you try working up a patch? :)

-Peff