From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:16:31 GMT
Subject: Re: remote branches, and branch names in general
Message-ID: <20090303041631.GB18136@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <m3vdqrtp84.fsf@localhost.localdomain>

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 04:38:42PM -0800, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> > I see the remote branches with names of the form remotes/pub/name where
> > pub is the nickname of the place I pull from.  To specify such branches,
> > must I always spell it out with the leading "remotes/", or can that be
> > shorted or implied somehow?  
> 
> You usually can omit "remotes/" prefix, and just use
> "<remote>/<branch>" (or even "<remote>" for "<remote>/HEAD"). You need
> it only if there is need for disambiguation.

Yes. I don't know if they are documented anywhere, but the complete
lookup order is:

  $ git grep -h -A8 ref_rev_parse_rules refs.c
  const char *ref_rev_parse_rules[] = {
          "%.*s",
          "refs/%.*s",
          "refs/tags/%.*s",
          "refs/heads/%.*s",
          "refs/remotes/%.*s",
          "refs/remotes/%.*s/HEAD",
          NULL
  };

-Peff