Re: [1.8.0] Provide proper remote ref namespaces

Johan Herland <johan@herland.net> writes:

While this is fine, I am not sure about the "HEAD" part. Most of the protocol do not convey which branch HEAD points at (instead "clone" has to guess), which eventually needs to be fixed. Incremental updates via "fetch" does not touch "HEAD" at all by design; unlike the real branch heads "remotes/origin/$branch" that are used to keep copies of what are at the remote, "remotes/origin/HEAD" is meant to be used by the local repository to designate which of the remote branch is considered the primary branch from local repository owner's point of view, primarily so that you can say "origin" locally to mean "origin/next" by setting the symref origin/HEAD to point at it. In that sense, the guess made by "clone" is only used to give an initial value.

I think you meant "refs/remotes/origin/heads/*" (note the slash) on the RHS of the branch refspecs.

How's that different from refs/*:refs/remotes/origin/* by the way? Also if you give tags a totally separate namespace, I don't see much reason to still give it the "auto-follow" semantics. It is far simpler to explain if you just fetch all of them and be done with it, no?

One argument for disagreement used to be that an explicit fetch of a single branch was a deliberate way to avoid updating the tracking branch before examining what has been changed (i.e. "git fetch origin master" followed by "git log origin/master..FETCH_HEAD" and hopefully followed by "git pull origin" or somesuch). But that was before reflog was adopted as a reliable safety measure, and I don't think people should rely on that behaviour anymore.

I would actually make an even stronger point that people should not base their workflow on keeping remote tracking refs deliberately stale, which is exactly the "feature" was meant to be used for. What has happened on the other end has already happened whether you like it or not, and there is no point in your locally pretending that it didn't happen. If you don't like the latest update there, you go talk to the party that control the remote and rectify the situation with them. It may involve pushing a reverting or correcting commit over there, or in the worst case you simply stop pulling from them, forking the project in effect at that point.

Yes, I do this all the time and I often say "git push ko maint master" (ko is my name for the k.org repo). I however don't feel inconvenienced by it precisely because when I make such a push, I _know_ that I want to push only these two branches. Saying "only these two branches" explicitly from the command line, and seeing only these two branches go out, are very assuring to me. I usually try to be much more organized to make sure all four integration branches satisfy certain preconditions before pushing, and I say "git push ko" only after I make sure they do.

I consider it is a good UI design to force myself to type more when I am doing something un(der)disciplined and to let me type less when I am following a good project hygiene.