Re: Difficulties in advertising a new branch to git newbies

From: Santi Béjar <sbejar@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 1, 2007, 09:02 UTC
Message-ID: <8aa486160702010102q3a49c4cfle44379a5f0b5422d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <200702010120.58806.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>

On 2/1/07, Josef Weidendorfer <Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Wednesday 31 January 2007, Carl Worth wrote:
> > > It would be nice if:
> > >
> > > git clone -b ${branch} git://...
>
> Nice indeed.
>
> Additionally, it would be nice for clone to directly
> checkout tags. Why not an option "--checkout <ref>"
> to directly checkout <ref> after cloning?

Maybe, I'm not sure.

Show 11 quoted lines

> > In addition, it would be great to have a command that did the same
> > setup within an existing repository.
>
> Why not use "git clone" for this?
> Currently, the man page says about the directory it will clone into:
>
>  "Cloning into an existing directory is not allowed."
>
> But we could relax this: if the specified directory is the root of
> a checkout (ie. with a .git subdir), we would clone a remote repository
> into the same local repository.

You can do it with git-remote. I think it is sensible to have a command to get a new repository and a command to have a new remote.

For the "work on the non-HEAD branch" I think we could have:

# clone a remote repository and start working with branch ${branch} $ git clone -b ${branch} ${url}

# add a new branch based on a remote branch, # and configure to pull from there. $ git branch ${branch} ${remote_branch} $ git checkout -b ${branch} ${remote_branch}

as you see it is the current syntax, so I suggest to automatically setup the branch.${branch}.{remote,merge} configs to follow the ${remote_branch} if this is sensible. So for example

$ git clone ${url_of_git.git} $ cd git $ git checkout -b maint origin/maint $ git-config -l | grep ^branch.maint branch.master.remote=origin branch.master.merge=refs/heads/maint

( or branch.master.merge=refs/remotes/origin/maint )

This changes the current behaviour, but I think it make sense. If this is not possible another way would be to have another option (-r for remote, or -f for follow, or -p for pull, or -m for merge, ...) as:

$ git branch ${branch} -r ${remote_branch} $ git checkout -b ${branch} -r ${remote_branch}

And if you want to add/change the remote/merge config for an existing branch, in addition to doing this with git-config, git-remote could do it as it currently shows the tracking branches.

Santi