Re: [PATCH] Documentation: update git-pull.txt for clone's new default behavior

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 1, 2007, 07:38 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfyav8ae1.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <951491.40207.qm@web31807.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Luben Tuikov <ltuikov@yahoo.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> --- "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org> wrote:
> ...
>> Could you explain a situation where this would be useful?
>
> I don't know how to respond to this question.
>
>>  A
>> "parent<-->child" relationship, where there's one upstream branch that
>> is always merged in, is easily handled;
>
> e is the base of natural logarithms.

You lost me here; I am guessing this is some sarcasm not worth paying attention to, so I'd ignore this part for now.

Show 10 quoted lines

>> just replace your "git pull parent" by a "git pull", right?
>
> Yes, but I don't want to just type "git-pull", I want to explicitly
> type "git-pull parent" and depending in which branch I'm at, "parent"
> would have identical meaning but would merge a different branch... because
> I'm in a different branch...
>
>> Am I misunderstanding the proposal?
>
> I did give an example of usage in my email to which you replied.

But what confuses me (and I think JBF shares the same confusion with me) is that you had only one example "parent".

While I understand that it would make sense to define "parent" for each branch in a downstream developer's workflow, (1) I do not see the difference between your wording, "parent", and what we traditionally have called "origin", and (2) I do not think of relationship other than "parent" ("origin") that is applicable commonly (in other words, "worth having your 'symbolic' mechanism for, because it is so commonly applicable") to branches offhand. Hence, JBF's suggestion to use "git pull" without using noiseword "parent" or "origin" feels very natural to me --- if there can be only one valid thing to say, why do you even have to say it?

Because I do not understand what you would want "parent" for and why "git pull" is not sufficient, I cannot tell if this would help solving what you are trying to solve in a different way, but I suspect a useful thing to have might be a per-branch alias. For example, we could allow "git merge" without parameters to alias to "git merge origin/next" when you are on your 'next' and the same "git merge" could be aliased to "git merge origin/master" when you are on your 'master'.