Re: [PATCH v6 0/4] fetch: avoid fetching every branch of a new remote in a shallow repo

From: Harald Nordgren <haraldnordgren@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2026, 19:51 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHwyqnXz+acRBytu9tWL+RzsKnzTZyZCnzzQQhEFjvWT5cgoww@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqv77hs7ut.fsf@gitster.g>

Show 6 quoted lines

> If you try to run this with [1/4] alone, however, it errors out with
> "fatal: --refmap option is only meaningful with command-line
> refspec", which is suboptimal when triggered by a configuration
> variable.  Even though our design says that remote.*.refmap makes
> the command behave as if the user gave '--refmap' on the command
> line, applying that rule here is a bit too strict.

Thanks for pointing that out. How did you find that?

> Then there is the last part, where the desired behavior is unclear.
> What should happen if the remote.origin.* configuration defines both
> fetch and refmap?  How would we explain our choice to the users?  I
> do not have a good answer to this design question.

I think that when both `remote.<name>.fetch` and `remote.<name>.refmap` are configured, remote.<name>.fetch can win.

Show 27 quoted lines

> +test_expect_success 'remote.<name>.refmap without tracking (baseline)' '
> +       test_when_finished "rm -fr fetch-refmap-baseline" &&
> +       git init fetch-refmap-baseline &&
> +       (
> +               cd fetch-refmap-baseline &&
> +               git remote add origin ../ &&
> +
> +               # without fetch refspec, but with fetch refmap
> +               git config --unset-all remote.origin.fetch &&
> +               git config remote.origin.refmap "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*" &&
> +
> +               # nothing tracked, nothing fetched, no error
> +               git fetch origin 2>error &&
> +               test_grep ! "fatal: --refmap option is only meaningful" error &&
> +               git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/remotes/ >actual &&
> +               test_line_count = 0 actual &&
> +
> +               # nothing tracked, explicit ref on the command line
> +               git fetch origin main &&
> +               git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/remotes/ >actual &&
> +               echo refs/remotes/origin/main >expect &&
> +               test_cmp expect actual &&
> +
> +               # what should happen when we have both refmap and refspec?
> +               git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*" &&
> +               git fetch origin
> +       )

Thanks for providing this!

Harald