Re: Dangers of working on a tracking branch

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Feb 15, 2007, 22:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20070215220918.GB27526@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <17876.55542.236594.121347@lisa.zopyra.com>

Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thursday, February 15, 2007 at 16:58:16 (-0500) Jeff King writes:
> >On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 03:53:01PM -0600, Bill Lear wrote:
> >> 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? :)
> 
> Well, I seriously thought about it, but the git-clone code is pretty
> dense.  It might be educational though, and since I'm the only one
> who wants it ... might be worth a shot.

Careful.

Lets say you patch git-clone to create these branches under refs/heads, and also under refs/remotes/origin. Now someone else modifies one of those branches, and you do a git-fetch to get the latest. The tracking branch under refs/remotes/origin would update, but not the one in refs/heads. Which means "jumping right in" may actually cost you a lot more time, because you are now starting on something that is several days old.

-- 
Shawn.