Re: Question about "git pull --rebase"

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2009, 20:18 UTC
Message-ID: <7vlji7k0dm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4B005AEC.1000002@gmail.com>

Johan 't Hart <johanthart@gmail.com> writes:

Show 28 quoted lines

> Francis Moreau schreef:
>> Looks like you did :)
>>
>> I've been somehow confused by the git-pull man page, which says:
>>
>>   A parameter <ref> without a colon is equivalent to <ref>: when
>>   pulling/fetching, so it merges <ref> into the current branch without
>>   storing the remote branch anywhere locally
>>
>> So I thought that both of the commands were equivalent for 'git pull
>> --rebase'.
>>
>> Thanks for the explanation.
>
> Ah that part.
>
> It means that
> $ git pull --rebase origin master
>
> means the same as:
> $ git pull --rebase origin master:
> (note extra colon at the end)
>
> But not as:
> $ git pull --rebase origin master:foo
>
> It means that, when you give a refspec without a colon, it is the same
> as the refspec with the colon and without the right side.

Thanks for clearing it up.

I was puzzled by the above pointing-finger because I wanted to see where a misinformation originated from to fix it at the source. But still don't see anything wrong with it.

Perhaps there was some other part of the manual that confused Francis to think master: and master:foo are equivalent in that context? I somehow doubt it, but if there is one, we would need to fix that

In a separate thread, Thomas reported a gross misinformation in github wiki he recently fixed:

    From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
    Subject: Re: [PATCH] pull: refuse complete src:dst fetchspec arguments
    Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:24:03 +0100
    Message-ID: <200911151324.05109.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Perhaps that page had some impact on this misunderstanding?