Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

Nope.

I simply don't _have_ those branches.

Why? Because the kernel is _distributed_. There is no central place (certainly not my repository) that tracks all the possible branches that might get merged.

In other words, I repeat: in a TRULY DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT it makes more sense to have a "pull" that fetches and merges, over something that fetches separately and then merges. Because in a truly distributed environment, you simply DO NOT HAVE static branches that you can associate with particular sources.

See?

And the thing is, I think the git design should be geared towards true distribution. It should NOT be geared toward a fairly static set of branches that all have a fairly static set of other repositories associated with them. Can you see the difference?

I'm personally convinced that one of the reasons people tend to use git in a centralized manner is just a mental disease that has its roots in how they used _other_ SCM's. I don't want git design to be polluted by such a centralized notion.

So to repeat: you can always make "pull" boil down to "pull from myself" (aka just "merge"), but you can _not_ make "fetch + merge" boil down to "pull" without meking up extra state to track separately. In other words, "pull" really is the strictly more powerful operation.