Re: fetch and pull

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 18, 2009, 09:37 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1vsvi339.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090318085849.GA8118@atjola.homenet>

Björn Steinbrink <B.Steinbrink@gmx.de> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 1) You do "git pull git://host/repo.git" or similar, i.e. you don't use
> a remote. Because then, no refspec is given to fetch, and it defaults to
> fetching HEAD.
> ...
> 1) probably isn't that common for most users, and even if, it's not
> one of the commands given as examples to which the paragraph applies.

I think "a maintainer responds to a pull request" is the only case that happens often in practice for a fetch+merge of HEAD from a remote repository.

Even in that case, we strongly encourage people to say not just "which repository location" but also "which branch", i.e.

	Linus, please pull from:

		git://git.or.cz/alt-git.git for-linus

	to obtain the following commits.

When Linus cuts and pastes that to his shell, the command will become:

	$ git pull git://git.or.cz/alt-git.git for-linus

and HEAD is not involved in such a use case.