From: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 13:12:23 GMT
Subject: Re: how to make "pull" always pulling the matching branch?
Message-ID: <4A0AC737.7030202@drmicha.warpmail.net>
In-Reply-To: <20090512192140.GK31826@cs-wsok.swansea.ac.uk>

Oliver Kullmann venit, vidit, dixit 12.05.2009 21:21:
> Hello,
> 
> until some time ago,
> 
> git pull remote-repo
> 
> worked like that; alright, at some time
> warning messages appeared, so I used
> 
> git pull remote-repo master
> 
> I attempted several times to understand the
> strange message issued by pull:
> --------------------
> You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
> want to merge with, and 'branch.master.merge' in
> your configuration file does not tell me either.        Please
> specify which branch you want to merge on the command line and
> try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>').
> See git-pull(1) for details.
> 
> If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to
> configure the following variables in your configuration
> file:
> 
>     branch.master.remote = <nickname>
>     branch.master.merge = <remote-ref>
>     remote.<nickname>.url = <url>
>     remote.<nickname>.fetch = <refspec>
> 
> See git-config(1) for details.
> --------------------
> but neither do I understand what could be meant here, nor
> do I understand the details of git-pull or git-config w.r.t.
> this issue (the above doesn't give a hint about the meaning
> of the possible actions).
> 
> So well, now the same thing happened with "git push", but here
> the message actually is better and tells the reader what to do
> (nearly); so I specified "matching" for the config-variable 
> push.default, and that's fine.
> 
> I was hoping that there would also be a pull.default, which I could
> set to matching, but apparently there is nothing like that? How
> do I achieve this?
> 
> It seems rather sensible to me to have this as the default: just
> pull a matching branch, not more, not less --- what else could/should
> it be if nothing else is specified?

Is "remote-repo" in your case a URL or a remote config? For the latter
you should have remote.foo.{url,fetch} config already.

The branch.foo.{remote,merge} is set up automatically in many cases. Do
you have any of these?

Michael