Re: [PATCH resend] make "git push" update origin and mirrors, "git push --mirror" update mirrors

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Apr 27, 2008, 17:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20080427173446.GM29771@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vabjflvlh.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
> 
> > I _hate_ the default remote. [...]
> 
> It sounds as if you want to say it a bit stronger than that --- to you,
> defaulting to 'origin' is not of "little to no" but "negative" value, is
> it?
> 
> But I think we are minotiry.  To people with "CVS migrant" workflow,
> cloning from _the_ central repo, hacking, and then pushing back will never
> involve anything other than 'origin' and local repositories, and I am
> sympathetic when they want to say "git push" and have it default to that
> single other repository.

Yes, I think we are in the minority. Many people come to Git from a centralized system so the idea of just a single place to pull/push from makes perfect sense to them.

But then they later wonder why they need `git pull origin branch` to merge in branch, when they usually just say `git pull`. What is the need for that funny keyword `origin`? Why do I have to say where to get the branch from sometimes and not others?

I think this argument is like the one we had with `git pull . branch` vs. `git merge branch`. However we probably could have gotten users to accept `git merge . branch`, as the main argument there was the fact that git-merge (the natural command to invoke) didn't actually do what the user wanted, and git-pull did.

Just take the above as the rantings of someone who knows git a little too well, and has tried to teach it to people who don't, and they all have asked about the funny (to them) need for origin in git-pull/git-push command line sometimes (no refspecs) and not others (with refspecs).

-- 
Shawn.