Re: Dangers of working on a tracking branch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 16, 2007, 15:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20070216152130.GA7086@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <17877.51730.418633.750922@lisa.zopyra.com>

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 09:13:22AM -0600, Bill Lear wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> % git pull ../peer_repo topic:topic
> [...]
> * refs/heads/topic: not updating to non-fast forward branch 'topic' of ../peer_repo
> [...]
> So, why does it say "not updating to non-fast forward branch", yet
> it does the merge and gets the changes anyway?

Because your pull command really means "merge in the topic branch from peer_repo, and while you're at it, store it in my local tracking branch topic". Remember that pull is really a fetch+merge. But the fetch is actually doing _two_ things: putting the fetched branch into FETCH_HEAD, and putting it in into refs/heads/topic. The latter fails (because of a non-fastforward), but pull actually uses the FETCH_HEAD results to do the merge.

Yes, this seems overly complex for what you're doing, but the reason for FETCH_HEAD is to support pulls when you _don't_ have a tracking branch at all (i.e., 'git pull ../peer_repo topic').

-Peff