Re: Terminology question about remote branches.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 09:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20070805092451.GB12507@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <85odhnfiau.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 05:09:13PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:

> Ok, so a remote tracking branch is a forcefully merged branch, so we
> put it into a separate category where we won't get tempted to have a
> branch head which will get overwritten.

I would hesitate to use the word "merge" here at all. You really are just throwing away the old value, and overwriting it with the new value. See my other email for more details.

Show 6 quoted lines

> This whole "remote tracking" appears to be more a matter of _policy_
> rather than inherent design.  It would appear that local and remote
> tracking branches have no fundamental differences, they just get
> different defaults which make it less likely for the first to lose
> local changes, and less likely for the second to miss remote changes
> (in particular where those involve messing up the history).

Yes, I think that's fair to say.

> But it would be easy to create chimeras when working outside of the
> porcelain, right?

Sure, but then you are responsible for the mess it creates. :)

-Peff