Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Nov 15, 2006, 20:21 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0611151516360.2591@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0611151203450.3349@woody.osdl.org>

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I'm saying that even if you _never_ end up using "git fetch" ever again 
> (because in practice you always want to do a "fetch + merge == pull"), 
> people who teach others the concepts and usage of git should probably 
> start by talking about "git fetch".
> 
> Then, when the user says (and he obviously will say this) "but I don't 
> want to just fetch the other persons work into some local branch, I want 
> to actually get it into _my_ branch", you say "Ahhah!" and talk about how 
> "pull" is a shorthand for first fetching and then merging the result into 
> the current branch.

Actually I believe it would make things even clearer if "merge" was taught at that point. Only when the user is comfortable with the separate notions of fetching and merging might the pull shorthand possibly be mentioned.