Re: [PATCH/RFC] remote: support --all for the prune-subcommand

From: Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2011, 07:40 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPQNSb7NYTac5uWSegK9rmYz1n0yt1GJWHKUtLg1k_OYHdDNg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABPQNSZ-ELfFuxmKMqXCQaAgMZMRsZG3S5wWJLsjkYVvK6aGug@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:18 AM, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 04, 2011 at 09:10:40AM +0200, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
>>
>>> >  git fetch --all --prune
>>> >
>>> I wasn't aware that fetch could prune, but yeah, that seems much
>>> better to me. Perhaps a mention of this in the "git remote prune"
>>> documentation could steer other users in the right direction?
>>
>> Yeah, that makes sense.
>>
>> There is one slight difference: I think "git remote prune" will _just_
>> prune, and not fetch into existing refs at all. I'm not sure exactly
>> why you would want that, though.
>
> Hmm, you might want to do that on, say, a mobile network to save
> bandwidth; i.e throw away the stale branches, but not yet update the
> non-stale ones because downloading the objects might take a long time
> (and/or be expensive).
>
> So with that in mind, I actually think my patch makes sense in some
> cases, but it certainly is less useful that I originally though ;)

Strike that part; I hadn't had my morning coffee yet. It might make sense to have similar _functionality_, but having this as a flag to "git fetch" instead of "git remote prune" strikes me as the only sane approach.

In fact, I'm not sure I understand why we simply do not always prune by default. My guess would be backward compatibility, but this strikes me as one of these things where we should introduce a config variable (there's already one for git-gui: gui.pruneduringfetch), add a warning if unset, and flip the default at some future major release. After all, a remote branch isn't the user's branch - it's a cache/mirror some other user's branch. If a user wants to keep another user's branch, surely the most sane thing would be to make a local branch of it?