Re: master^ is not a local branch -- huh?!?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 30, 2010, 08:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20100130085957.GA20112@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1001291641200.1681@xanadu.home>

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 04:51:18PM -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> > Using a detached head is a more advanced feature than wanting to
> > checkout a remote branch locally, creating a local tracking branch. As
> > such, 'git checkout origin/topic' now means the same as 'git checkout
> > -t origin/topic', and you can get the old behavior back by doing 'git
> > checkout origin/topic^0'.
> 
> What purpose does this "feature" serve?  Making sure people remain 
> stupid and get even more confused when the special dwimery doesn't work 
> because they don't know the difference between a local branch and a 
> remote tracking branch?
> 
> And now people will be left wondering why after a fetch they don't get 
> the latest stuff when they do "git checkout topic" again.  Is this any 
> better?

I am entering the discussion a bit late, and things have moved on from this point, but I wanted to mention that I have in the past made the same argument that you have in your second paragraph (that you leave users _more_ confused after a fetch), but somebody (I think Jay) managed to convince me otherwise.

The saving feature is that we now print out the symmetric difference information between a branch and its upstream during checkout. So the user experience looks like:

  $ git checkout topic
  Branch topic set up to track remote branch topic from origin.
  Switched to a new branch 'topic'

  ... time passes ...

  $ git fetch
  ...
     9f137a4..22ac6a6  topic      -> origin/topic

  $ git checkout topic
  Switched to branch 'topic'
  Your branch is behind 'origin/topic' by 6 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.

So I think it is not quite as bad as at least I had originally thought. There are still a few rough edges, though:

  1. If I stay on the 'topic' branch and run "git fetch", then I don't
     see the checkout message. If I don't understand that a local branch
     has been created, I might expect the new changes to be present. But
     they're not. If I do a pull instead, it does "just work", even if I
     am clueless about the local branch.

     I wonder if a "fetch" which updates the upstream branch of the
     current HEAD should print something like the "Your branch is
     behind..." message.

  2. If I am clueless that the local branch exists, I can see that there
     are new changes that I can "fast forward". But if I am clueless
     about local branches, do I know that means I need to run "git merge
     origin/topic"?  However, I can't think of an improved message that
     would make the situation clear without adding a bunch of annoying
     text.

-Peff