Re: Terminology question about remote branches.

From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Aug 4, 2007, 17:19 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0708041804260.13596@beast.quantumfyre.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <85r6mjdyl8.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> "Lars Hjemli" <lh@elementstorage.no> writes:
>
>> The magic setup that makes this happen is the following lines in .git/config:
>>
>> [remote "origin"]
>>         url = git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
>>         fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
>>
>> [branch "master"]
>>         remote = origin
>>         merge = refs/heads/master
>>
>>
>> Was this helpful?
>
> It would be helpful.  Except that nothing whatsoever can be found in
> .git/config concerning my local and my remote tracking branches.  So
> where is that information _really_ hidden away?

It really is in .git/config, _provided_ that your repo was created by 1.5.0 or newer. Older versions had a more distributed setup using files in .git/remotes/ and .git/branches/

> .git/FETCH_HEAD maybe?

Nope, that's just information about what got fetched last. A purely temporary thing.

Show 7 quoted lines

> It also appears that doing
>
> git-checkout --track -b mybranch origin
>
> on a git.git clone does _not_ create a tracking branch.  I can't
> figure out what I could specify as an origin to create a tracking
> branch that would get reflected in .git/FETCH_HEAD.

With pre 1.5 you didn't get remote tracking branches in a separate namespace. The default was to have a local branch called origin which was the "remote tracking branch" for the master branch - but this wasn't enforced. So with your repo the origin branch _is_ the remote tracking branch ... or at least the closet a pre 1.5 setup gets.

> What gives?

It would appear that your repo was created with an old version of git. Which also explains why you were talking about origin as a branch - which it used to be (a real local branch too ...), rather than as a remote - which it is now.

The whole remotes/tracking mechanism changed in 1.5.0 - now it's much more flexible (and probably more complicated too).

-- 
Julian

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