Re: Terminology question about remote branches.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 16:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20070805164557.GA20721@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070805124050.c1345ec9.seanlkml@sympatico.ca>

On Sun, Aug 05, 2007 at 12:40:50PM -0400, Sean wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> To me it's yet another example of bad UI design in Git.   Git already
> had remote-tracking branches, which conceptually were relatively easy
> to explain.  Instead of leveraging this foundation, and adding the
> ability for local branches to pick a default remote-tracking branch
> to use for merging, Git instead implemented direct remote tracking
> from local branches.  After having read the thread Jeff mentioned
> earlier i'm still at a loss as to how this decision was justified.

To be fair, the default remote-tracking branch stuff predates the thread I pointed you to. But I do agree it makes the system that much more confusing to have it this way.

There is a clash between users with different workflows here, I think. For example, I almost _never_ run git-pull, but instead always fetch, inspect, and then merge from a tracking branch. So I think of tracking branches as a first-class item. But I suspect Linus doesn't use tracking branches at all, since he pulls directly from a variety of different repositories.

-Peff