Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] add a --delete option to git push

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 14, 2009, 05:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20090814052153.GA2881@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1250226349-20397-2-git-send-email-srabbelier@gmail.com>

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:05:48PM -0700, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

> Those new to git have a hard time learning how to delete a remote
> ref. This makes it easier for them to find out how by providing a
> flag to git push.

Should this also impact refs read from the config? E.g., if I do "git push --delete" will it try to impact matching refs (which is almost certainly a mistake), or refs I have in my remote.$X.push (which is probably also a mistake)?

>From reading your patch, it looks like it just touches the command-line.

I think that's the right thing to do, but I think it makes sense to think half a second to make sure.

And with the way you have it, "git push --delete" will silently ignore the --delete and push configured refspecs. Probably it should say "--delete is useless without refspecs on the command line".

>     Currently `git push --delete master:master` results in a somewhat
>     cryptic error message. It seems unlikely however, that those new
>     to git would use the 'old:new' notation, so I haven't bothered
>     guarding against it and settled for documenting it.

It seems like it would be simple enough to just check whether the refspec contains a colon; if so, silently leave it alone. That could also protect configured refspecs, as mentioned above, but I wouldn't rule out somebody have a single-name refspec in their config (in fact, I think "remote.$X.push = HEAD" is reasonable -- should that delete the HEAD on "git push --delete"?).

Show 5 quoted lines

> +--delete::
> +    Delete the specified refs. Prefixes all refs with ':' to tell the
> +    push machinery to delete the specified ref. As such, the refs
> +    that are to be deleted should not contain a ':' specifier.
> +

This impacts _all_ refspecs. Remember that we can have multiple refspecs on the command-line. So I can "move" a ref remotely with:

  git push :old-name old-name:new-name

but I can't do:

  git push --delete old-name old-name:new-name

Ignoring colon-less refspecs would make that work, but would not allow the similar:

  # branch has already been renamed to new-name locally
  git push --delete old-name new-name

So maybe it would make more sense for it to be "--delete <ref>" and impact only a single ref. The simple case of "git push --delete foo" would remain unchanged.

The counter-argument is that "--delete" does not necessarily need to be as powerful as the ":ref" syntax, but I don't see the downside in making it so.

-Peff