Re: [RFC/PATCH] Add fetch.updateHead option

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 18, 2020, 09:30 UTC
Message-ID: <87wnyjdnb3.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20201118091219.3341585-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com>

On Wed, Nov 18 2020, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Users might change the behavior when running "git fetch" so that the
> remote's HEAD symbolic ref is updated at certain point.
>
> For example after running "git remote add" the remote HEAD is not
> set like it is with "git clone".
>
> Setting "fetch.updatehead = missing" would probably be a sensible
> default that everyone would want, but for now the default behavior is to
> never update HEAD, so there shouldn't be any functional changes.
>
> For the next major version of Git, we might want to change this default.
>
> Signed-off-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
> ---
>
> This is just a RFC, the tests are missing.

I haven't taken much time to re-think through the patch/implications of this, but I remember running into this and going through some pre-patch investigation at some point.

It's really annoying in some cases that "clone" isn't creating the same state as "remote". IIRC I was doing some heuristics to figure out the remote branch name etc.

Isn't this something we can just change without an option? There were a bunch of cases in clone/fetch that were different for no different reasons, IIRC I patched one or two of those in the past. But I haven't gone through the history of the feature and checked if it was intentional.