Re: [RFC 2/2] Automatically transform .git/{branches,remotes} into .git/config

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 21, 2005, 22:26 UTC
Message-ID: <7vpsotmych.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0511211653420.2569@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Josef Weidendorfer wrote:
>
>> On Monday 21 November 2005 14:56, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>> > With this patch, git automatically extracts the information from 
>> > .git/branches and .git/remotes, puts it into .git/config, and renames the 
>> > directories to .git/branches.old and .git/remotes.old, respectively.
>> 
>> Please... don't trash .git/branches.
>> This is about Cogito, not about Git. You will render every repository cloned
>> with Cogito useless, as it expects a per-branch configuration with the same
>> name as heads.
>> 
> I was aware that .git/branches was introduced by Pasky, but as it is 
> handled in git-parse-remote.sh, I thought that it may be a bit more 
> general than just cogito.

What Josef said is correct in that I was not aware of the fact that Cogito branches/ are *per-branch* configuration when I did parse-remote. remotes/ are deliberately *per-remote* configuration, because it is more efficient when you are downloading more than one refs from the same remote over a git-aware protocol. Arguably, it is optimizing for the wrong case, because it may well be a minority case to keep track of more than one remote head. I dunno.

I am not sure if it is a good idea to automatically convert what is stored in .git/branches to .git/remotes (or the equivalent of the latter in .git/config), but if somebody wanted to do it, the right thing would be:

 - grab the URL without optional fragment '#rembranch' part from
   all branches/* file;

 - group the ones that fetch from the same URL into one
   remotes/$file (what to call that file is very debatable
   because the original branches/* is in different namespace and
   we cannot tell what the user wants to call the remote),
   giving appropriate head mapping.  branches/$branch file with
   the fragment part '#$rembranch' translates to "Pull:
   $rembranch:$branch".