Re: FETCH_HEAD question

> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:35 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > Now to something totally useless.
> >
> > After reading the builtin-merge.c and original git-merge.sh (now in
> > contrib/examples) script, I think it could have done something entirely
> > different.
> >
> > It could have done this instead.
> >
> >        sed -e '/       not-for-merge   /d'
> >
> > to learn the commits and their human-readable origins, and it could have
> > tried to reproduce what "git pull" did when it invoked git-merge using
> > that information.  Then you could use this workflow:
> >
> >        $ git pull <possibly with arguments>
> >        ... oops, conflicted and is very messy.
> >        ... I tried to resolve, but failed and made the mess even worse.
> >        ... Let's start over.
> >        $ git reset --hard
> >        ... FETCH_HEAD knows which refs are for merging
> >        $ git merge FETCH_HEAD
> >
> > That is, no matter what the arguments were for the initial "git pull",
> > what should be merged is recorded in FETCH_HEAD, and that is how you can
> > retry the merge without refetching over the network.
> >
> > But such a change makes FETCH_HEAD different from what it traditionally
> > meant, and does that only to "git merge", making the result very
> > inconsistent.  For example, "git log ..FETCH_HEAD" will still use the
> > object name on the first line, and it won't be a way to convince yourself
> > that the changes are sensible and it is Ok to run "git merge FETCH_HEAD"
> > anymore.  So I do not think such a change will be an improvement.
> 
> Unless dwim_ref() is updated to handle FETCH_HEAD specially, and
> return not the first SHA1, but the one not marked "not-for-merge".
> Then the UI would at least be consistent, but this would not be
> backward compatible.