From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:43:45 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] builtin-remote: add set-head verb
Message-ID: <20090214034345.GB24545@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <76718490902131859u4645dc62h79632cb20ee90d69@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 09:59:06PM -0500, Jay Soffian wrote:

> What should we show in the output of "git remote show origin" next to
> the HEAD line? master, or frotz? If we show master, then user might
> wonder why "git remote set-head origin --auto" leaves
> refs/remotes/origin/HEAD set to frotz. If we show frotz, then user
> might wonder why when they cloned the repo in the first place they
> ended up with HEAD set to master.
> 
> I'm bothered by that inconsistency, which is why I didn't follow-up
> with another patch immediately.

Hrm. Yeah, I think to avoid surprising the user, "--auto" has to use
whatever we showed in "git remote show".

> But I will propose an alternative. In the output of "get remote show
> origin", we show all matching branches. If the user does a set-head
> --auto and we cannot determine HEAD unambiguously, we do something
> like:
> 
> $ git remote set-head origin --auto
> error: Multiple branches match HEAD. Please choose one explicitly with:
>    git remote set-head origin master
>    git remote set-head origin frotz

I like that proposal. It doesn't hide from the user that we are doing a
matching guess, which means we are less likely to surprise them in the
long run.

-Peff