Re: What is the default refspec for fetch?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 8, 2014, 10:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20141108105221.GA20750@peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAENte7inZ5fm2SzNPq=HNPKnPco9tM4T_es5Dphnpbia-uiLdg@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 04:31:08PM +0100, Christian Halstrick wrote:

> In a repo where no remote.<name>.fetch config parameter is set what
> should a "git fetch" do? My experiments let me think it's
> "HEAD:FETCH_HEAD". Right?

Basically, yes. We always write FETCH_HEAD, regardless of the refspec. We choose "HEAD" if no other refspec was provided. So it is really more like

  git fetch $remote HEAD

This is what makes one-off bare-url pulls work, like:

  git pull git://...

It runs fetch under the hood, which writes into FETCH_HEAD, and then we merge that.

-Peff