Re: Change "pull" to _only_ download, and "git update"=pull+merge?

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Apr 19, 2005, 23:20 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0504191908290.30848-100000@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <42658888.60007@dwheeler.com>

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> In a _logical_ sense that's true; I'd only want to pull data if I intended
> to (possibly) do something with it.  But as a _practical_ matter,
> I can see lots of reasons for doing a pull as a separate operation.
> One is disconnected operation; (...)

That's true. I think I actually like "git pull" as the operation for "make sure I have everything I need, so I can lose net".

Show 9 quoted lines

> What command would you suggest for the common case
> of "update with current track?"  I've proposed "git update [NAME]".
> "git merge" with update-from-current-track as default seems unclear, and
> I worry that I might accidentally press RETURN too soon & merge with
> the wrong thing.  And I like the idea of "git update" doing the same thing
> (essentially) as "cvs update" and "svn update"; LOTS of people "know"
> what update does, so using the same command name for one of the most
> common operations smooths transition (GNU Arch's "tla update"
> is almost, though not exactly, the same too.)

I think that having "git update" update a tracked branch is best, if only as an aid to discoverability. And "git merge" should require you to say what you want to merge with, because it's too easy to pick a wrong default, and the user had better know.

It seems to me like this makes "update" identical to "merge <tracked>", so "update [NAME]" and "merge" don't make sense, since they'd do the other command, but less intuitively.

	-Daniel
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