Re: git annoyances

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

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My co-workers frequently get confused by this too. The problem is that "x86/latest" is a locally existing remote branch ref, while "x86 latest" is supposed to be a branch ref on a remote system.

I think the real problem here is that you can't refer to a remote+branch as a single "word". If you could, then people could just learn to use that everywhere and never get confused.

For example, in svn you can talk about svn+ssh://reposerver/path/to/repo/branches/foo@1234; it's a single "word" that refers to a particular revision on a particular branch of a particular server. It therefore makes sense to talk about copying from one branch to another, etc, using exactly one word for the source and one for the destination.

Imagine if "git pull ~/linux/2.6-x86.git:latest" would work; then it could mean exactly the same thing as "git merge ~/linux/2.6-x86.git:latest" (which would presumably switch to 'pull' mode automatically). Or even "git diff master..x86:latest", which could diff my local master with an auto-fetched x86:latest.

Naturally we'd have to find a new punctuation mark for this, since all the obvious ones are already used :)

Have fun,

Avery