Re: release-notes could be clearer on git-fetch changes

From: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Date: Feb 20, 2014, 11:06 UTC
Message-ID: <5305E1A9.1050203@alum.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1402192356480.1491@nerf08.vanv.qr>

On 02/19/2014 11:58 PM, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> On Wednesday 2014-02-19 21:01, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de> writes:
>>> The release notes for 1.9.0 read:
>>>
>>>> * The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to
>>>>   fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_
>>>>   what are fetched by the same command line without the option.
>>>
>>> I think the release notes should also say -- like it was done
>>> extensively for git add -- how to get back the old
>>> behavior (perhaps through now-different commands).
>>
>> Perhaps, but the release note is not a place to repeat what the
>> documentation already teaches---it primarily is to enumerate the
>> changed areas, to highlight the things users may want to look up in the
>> documentation, to give them a starting point.
>>
>> You would do something like this, I would think:
>>
>> 	git fetch $there 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
> 
> Looking at it from one more angle, `git fetch r --tags` and
> `git push r --tags` is now no longer symmetric :(

I'm glad you brought this up, because I didn't really think about whether "git push" would need changes parallel to those in "git fetch".

I use "git push" in very conservative ways, so I don't know its ins and outs. What scenarios do you find asymmetric? Were they more symmetric before?

Perhaps you don't like that when some branch is configured for pushing via remote.$remote.push, so that

    git push $remote

would push something, then you would expect

    git push --tags $remote

to push the same something *plus* the tags. But I'm not sure that is desirable. Pushing is a lot more traumatic than fetching, because any mistakes are obvious to all of your collaborators. So I think it is OK that the command is more reticent about pushing things that were specified implicitly.

One thing I personally don't like is that

    git push $remote --all --tags

is not allowed. I would expect it to push all branches and all tags. But at least it just emits an error rather than doing something unexpected.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/